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Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

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Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#251

Post by dorfsmay »

ahjones wrote: post #163
davedx wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Hangouts is much lower friction and generally easier to use than Skype! What good alternatives are there to Hangouts? Preferably something that doesn't require flaky browser plugins.

I like Zoom ( http://zoom.us/ ). I used to use Hangouts, but it consumed a lot of CPU. The free Zoom account allows you to have up to fifty people in a room for forty minutes, or an unlimited length call with just two participants.

I've used zoom.us quite a bit and was family impressed. There's also appear.in which is not as good, but doesn't have all the restrictions the free zoom.us tier has.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#252

Post by mindo »

txdv wrote: post #93
mindo wrote: post #85

I'm surprised M$ haven't killed skype like the next day they bought it as they often do when they buy/take over companies and their products. Skype is actually the only M$ product I use, and I would be more than happy to move to anything else as long as there would be a good alternative to it...

How do they get $ with killing a product? Currently they are placing freaking annoying ads in Skype for freeloaders.

I doubt ads is the main source of revenue. They do sell DIDs, VOIP calls to landline phones and mobiles (with insane rates) so ads (only in few countries) doesn't account for much.

M$ bought lots of companies before, that eventually came to EOL even though they were doing pretty well before M$ bought them, it's not particularly about the skype (even though we see it gets worse over the time).

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#254

Post by verbify »

criddell wrote: post #245
lmm wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on plenty of good codebases. I think the key is continuous improvement. The code from 5 years ago is always going to be worse than today's code, but as long as you're able to improve code as you work on it it doesn't get too bad.

Once when I was interviewing for a job, I was given and offer and I accepted it conditionally. I asked to sit with a senior developer for 30 minutes and browse the code. Turns out it was in great shape and the person that gave me the walkthrough was one of the greatest programmers I've ever had the pleasure to work with.

Do you do this for every job you apply to?

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#255

Post by _jomo »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #185
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #31

Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time. From a personal standpoint, it crashes for me multiple times a day and I can rarely get group calls working on the first try. Often Skype requires a force-quit and then it crashes twice more when it is being restarted. This is on Mac and Android. Fun fact: I have a friend who…

Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress. Social everything means we can't visit a website today without calls to a billion external domains. Phones are doing the same as they're mini-tablets that suck at actual phone calls. Operating systems have taken on mobile centric (and the hideous flatten everything) design that is broken paradigm for a 15" laptop or 24" desktop s…

> All that crap should be in official plugins so you add pocket only if you want it etc.

They are working on making Pocket a (built-in) add-on. Apparently it's harder than it sounds, but there is some progress going on:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1215694

Edit: Apparently that bug is fixed and Pocket is a "system addon" in Firefox 46+

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/3ba655f6bc67

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#256

Post by bobmno »

lucb1e wrote: post #205
rdsubhas wrote: post #102

I've been educating as many people (especially Management and Business people) as I can to switch over from Skype to any other alternative (like Hangouts). Because Skype is: * A memory hog * A bandwidth hog (its really inefficient about network usage, and uses a lot of bandwidth even when idle) * Has much lower call quality (a consequence of the above), just try having a call in Hangouts or Skype and notice that Hang…

> * Is now owned by Microsoft This is not negative in itself. I don't like that it's part of a bigger company because of privacy and focus from intelligence agencies and hackers, but that's just me. I could imagine someone else thinking it's positive because it shows professionalism. Why is this a negative point for you? And why would something like Hangouts be better, or what would you suggest if you wanted to elimi…

History. MS past is plenty reason to avoid skype.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#257

Post by bnastic »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #31

Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time. From a personal standpoint, it crashes for me multiple times a day and I can rarely get group calls working on the first try. Often Skype requires a force-quit and then it crashes twice more when it is being restarted. This is on Mac and Android. Fun fact: I have a friend who…

From what I remember, it might have to do with the fact that they had to refactor the whole thing to not rely on P2P, which was its original model, since the rise of smartphones and unstable mobile networking? I think it now runs similarly to Hangouts - out of datacenters.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#258

Post by verbify »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #161

Stop using Skype. The NSA allegedly collects all Skype traffic anyways. Do you really want that? "The full capture of voice traffic began in February of 2011 for “Skype in” and “Skype out” calls—calls between a Skype user and a land line or cellphone through a gateway to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), captured through warranted taps into Microsoft’s gateways. But in July of 2011, the NSA added the capa…

I've given up on the NSA not reading my stuff. The NSA collects pretty much anything they can get their hands on. It's a losing battle. If there's something I don't want the NSA to know about, I use Tails.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#259

Post by lisivka »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #150
sangnoir wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maintaining anything proprietary under linux is a chore, with the ABI changing every year for no reason Is Skype a special snowflake to the extent that it's an impossible task? Skype-on-Linux's problem are caused by interface changes with the server API, not the ABI. Recompiling isn't rocket science.

recompiling isn't. packaging for every distribution, edge and not and building autoconf for all of them and ifdef all over the code? not rocket science either, but that stuff does carry an increased cost

More and more companies are just publishing their repos for Debian/Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS/Fedora/SuSE, which are built automatically from same source. If you have a problem with that, hire a developer.

Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client

#260

Post by smarinov »

cookiecaper wrote: post #249
anexprogrammer wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most things worked far, far better 10 years ago than today. Apparently this is progress. Social everything means we can't visit a website today without calls to a billion external domains. Phones are doing the same as they're mini-tablets that suck at actual phone calls. Operating systems have taken on mobile centric (and the hideous flatten everything) design that is broken paradigm for a 15" laptop or 24" desktop s…

>Firefox was a stripped down, light browser so it stayed fast - now they include more useless garbage than Netscape Communicator ever did. Sorry, I don't think Pocket and Hello surpasses the junk bundled with Communicator, which came with a custom mail client. Mozilla's mail client is not only not installed with Firefox, but it's also pretty much dead now, in fact.

Thanks for letting us know it was dead. I haven't realised it for the part few years of daily usage.
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