[deleted]
New Skype Update Is Horrible
61–70 of 334 posts
Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have high hopes for Discord video, which is coming out soon. Knowing the discord team and seeing the quality of the voice product, I'm finally going to be able to replace god-awful Google Hangouts.
What's god-awful about Hangouts, and does the new Hangouts Meet make things better? https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterp...
Haven't used Meet, wouldn't know how as it's the first time I have heard of it.
As for what's awful about it, where to start? Slow, hard to join, doesn't play well with multiple Google accounts, bugs and crashes with screen sharing, ...
Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible
#63Desktop app updated itself recently too.
At first I didn't realize is this a viber or telegram client. All the messengers now look the same...
Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible
#64Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible
#65Has skype ever been good? For as long as I can remember it was a necessary evil until we finally managed to replace it with Hangouts and the like.
...Has Hangouts ever been good? Like, I totally get complaining about Skype. The P2P stuff caused it to be kinda wonky. But your choice for "better" is Hangouts? Between the five or six alternative Google chat offerings, the attempts to merge it with the dialer and SMS apps, the cutting out of the online/offline statuses. Google Talk was great though, back in the day.
You don't really have to care what's going on in the wider Google ecosystem. Google hangouts (talk before) pretty much changed the name once. That's it.
As far as desktop experience goes there are no alternative offerings. Just ignore the mobile mess.
Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible
#66My worst Skype annoyance was when they seized your purchased credits if your account was left unused for 180 days. As a sporadic user of Skype when I needed to place an international call etc, having purchased credits reset automatically was such a provocation [0]. Every time I have to re-install Skype for some reason, there's always a new regression or dark UX pattern in use.
[0] https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01/14/skype-lawsuit-to-yie...
Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible
#67So it is not just us Linux users which will be hit by a horrible Skype upgrade? I run the by now ancient 4.3.0.37 (they never bothered to port Skype 5.0 an later to Linux) which they will kill off by the end of the month in a favor for their half-assed beta client which is still missing many of the features which Skype 4.3 had.
I gave up with the native clients earlier this year when I could no longer get any to run and log me in. I now use https://github.com/stanfieldr/ghetto-skype Yeah it's Electron web-shit and it doesn't work with video calls (but there are enough low-friction alternatives now like Hangouts I can insist on should a skype friend really want to video chat) but at least it's no worse than their browser interface and won't just stop working. And I don't have to worry about the potential of some RCE in their really old native binary.
I really just want them to de-unify MSN Messenger (those contacts who don't get on Matrix or anything else are the only reason I still use skype) and let me use Pidgin/Emesene again but that's way up there in the pipe dream clouds of never happening.
Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible
#68Has skype ever been good? For as long as I can remember it was a necessary evil until we finally managed to replace it with Hangouts and the like.
Prior to Microsoft at least, it was quite decent. And way ahead of everyone else in terms of actually-usable video/voice chatting, file transfers, etc. It all just worked, and it did so quickly.
Now.... holy cow. Use something else. It's dramatically worse in pretty much every single way.
Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have high hopes for Discord video, which is coming out soon. Knowing the discord team and seeing the quality of the voice product, I'm finally going to be able to replace god-awful Google Hangouts.
What's god-awful about Hangouts, and does the new Hangouts Meet make things better? https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterp...
Why would anyone at this point go with Google's solutions for voice/video? Last time someone over at Arstechnica did a count they had 4 or 5 competing and largely incompatible solutions - they are NOT a serious player when it comes to producing, and perhaps more importantly - maintaining, a Skype replacement/alternative.
Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible
#70Maybe mine is a lonely voice but I like Skype because: 1. It works. Every other video chat platform I have tried is simply unreliable and crashes. (Skype does so but with far less frequency). 2. Facetime is more reliable, true, but it is the only one and does not allow for group chat. (I have thrown down the gauntlet, and I realize I risk major downvoting for making such a controversial statement, but I cannot sit in…
For video chat, sure.
I think video chat itself is a bit over-rated, though; for most use-cases, a combination of frequent audio chat and less-frequent face-to-face conversation works just as well, and audio chat is a very-well-solved problem at the enterprise level (that solution being: set up a PBX server local to your central office; create a conference-call room in it. Bonus: make your employees SIP accounts; get them all to install soft-phone apps; now the conference line is "local" to all of them, so jitter is zero and everyone will hear everyone else in high-bitrate digital fidelity.)
Because that "solution" exists for N:M conversations, N:M video-streaming infrastructure just doesn't get very heavily invested in by any major parties. Instead, what you do see is heavy investment in 1:N video-streaming, ala Livestream/Twitch. If only one person needs to be visible at a time, and everyone else can survive with existing in a text chat-box adjacent to the video stream, you can do fine as well.
But, like you said, for N:M streaming with "conference call" semantics, Skype is one of the only good solutions.