Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
nickforall.nl
nickforall.nl
Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said the codebase is a true horror, an extreme mess, and that soon it would "reach a singularity" :-) He also said that there are whole parts of the codebase that he was not allowed to see, all indications pointing to stuff related to routing the traffic through servers of "the man" ;-)
After all they also took the money.
Edit: why the downvotes? It's a feature finely supported on desktop clients, and it does not work on Android - so in order to use Android Skype, I'd have to create a "pure" Skype account (with its own password!), and re-import all my contacts.
For me, that's a bug that has seen no activity for over 3 years.
...</sarcasm>
I compared by running the client on OS X, Win10 and Android in the same time. OS X and Win10 clients seemed to pretty much agree on availability status and to be correct.
But on Android, contacts that are yellow (away) show often as green (available).
Worse, sometimes those who are present show as being offline.
Yeah, pretty random!
Nowadays while it's still occasionally disconnecting at random at least the indicator seems to be more honest about what's going on I would like to believe it locks up less frequently.
The resource usage was lower, the UI was nicer and it was more responsive. It's really a shame they killed it.
I hope the next step is a sane API to let third-party clients integrate with it. It does not have to be XMPP, as long as it's something clear and well-supported.
eventually (up to 8 hours later) they did show up, mostly at the correct time as well, but that wasnt good enough for me.
What good alternatives are there to Hangouts? Preferably something that doesn't require flaky browser plugins.
But it was a great experience compared to Hangouts! The connection quality was on par with Skype and it was super light-weight for something based in the browser.
8.5/10, would use again.
It was on the front page of Hacker News just a couple of days ago, and that's where I found out about it. Much nicer clients, open protocol (so you can even make your own clients), reliable, and many more features than Hangouts make this a much better alternative.
For voice and video, however, I haven't found a good alternative that is easily accessible to people that don't want to set things up on their computer. Hangouts will just randomly not work for me, depending entirely on random chance, and I still can't find anything more convenient than it.
I've setup asterisk as a personal SIP/voip server and it works pretty good. You can even hook it up to a provider that lets you out on the telephone network. And SIP is built into many hardware phones already.
Hangouts is a funnel to get you to use their browser (still don't understand why it ships as a plugin) and social network first, chat application second.
I always assumed it was because it would be cross-platform by default. Making native apps for Hangouts on Windows, OS X and Linux would be pretty time consuming.
Also not sure what you mean by "social network", it looks a lot like a chat app to me.
I do have my suspicions that no one really cares about Linux on desktop and 99% people would agree, that even having a Linux client is a waste of time, and posts like yours are nothing but linux zealotry - "boo M$ antitrust making me use Windblows"...
That was the biggest reason I quit.
I just tried installing the Azure backup agent and after an hour of futzing with it, I just gave up. It installed like four different pre-requisites and forced Windows Update to run and install stuff without my permission. Still won't work and gives an ambigious error message that even google can't help. I never see this like this with MS on other platforms.
On other platforms the development is simpler and using more mature technology because there's no real benefit or pressure to dogfood.
Being a developer, I read this and think, what developer thinks any existing codebase is NOT a mess. It's the number one developer complaint ever. They (we?) all think we know a better way.
// X - uncommented on 1.2.03 to fix bug
// Y - commented again on 3.2.03 because it broke stuff
// if (condition)
{
... logic here, half of it commented out ...
}In the real world, production projects get messy because getting stuff done is more important than building a codebase that represents the paragon of academic excellence. That doesn't automatically make the project horrible.
Lack of motivation often means lack of process, lack of process often means lack of testing and maintenance, lack of testing and maintenance often means lack of quality. It's a vicious cycle too - once you start down the road it's harder and harder to get motivated about your product again.
Honestly, the only reason the codebase isn't a mess is its a single project I've been able to tightly control and enforce things on [because its 100% my problem if something goes wrong].
The rest of our codebase is filled with drama. :/
It is so bad that I literally cannot even give them my money.
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 screen. Firefox was a stripped down, light browser so it stayed fast - now they include more useless garbage than Netscape Communicator ever did. All that crap should be in official plugins so you add pocket only if you want it etc.
Nothing at all is user centric any more, it's all about how much lovely data can be sent back to hundreds of places.
The web is a lot prettier these days to be fair, but I don't call that progress if it's at a cost of a 1TB page load.
I could go on, but you get the idea.. :)
NoScript really brings this into visibility. I don't mind the domain running scripts. But the 10+ other domains that needs to run a script - sigh. My wife keeps asking my why I put up with it - it's quite simple; I decide if the page I'm about to visit is worth all the extra crap running and tracking me.
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.
The sad fact is that desktop mail clients are going away, and even the big projects like Thunderbird are barely limping along, which I guess is slightly nicer terminology than "pretty much dead"?
[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/releases/
[1] https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/07/06/thunderbird-stabi...
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/30/thunderbird-flies-away-from...
And there's about 10 million users that evidently have a reason to keep using it:
https://blog.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2015/12/thunderbird-act...
So I completely agree. I cringe every time I am forced to use webmail for some reason.
Just an example: try to create (and use) an IDN-based email address with non-ASCII characters in the local part. You will be amazed how incompatible on so many layers this actually is. I can hardly imagine there weren't dozens of similarly tricky situations where the developers of this, or any other email client for that matter, were forced to make quite serious design choices because of either ambiguity in standards, or widespread lack of support thereof.
Netscape had a chat thing, html publisher, and I think something else.
WebRTC, pocket, the webIDE, even things like the dom inspector, style editor etc and pdf are bloat for most mortals. Perfect for some "official" plugins. They managed it for the FF OS simulator.
It's all optional crap that increases bloat and attack surface, except it's not optional.
"pdf are bloat for most mortals"
That's alright, it means in 99% cases it's just a very small javascript file on your disk. No harm done.
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+
The "app-system-defaults" (in my case Pocket & Loop/Hello) don't seem to be shown to the user, but you can find them in the extensions.xpiState config.
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/file/5f2f4297e6bd...
Sigh. If you wanted to look up a business on your phone you'd have to call directory enquiries - did that "work better" than your smartphone? Did you prefer RealPlayer over HTML video? Was WAP better than LTE? Was Windows XP the pinnacle of OS design?
Yeah, sometimes progress is a double-edged sword that outdates some things we used to do. Yes, it's worth the price.
A single screwdriver is better than a toolbox at being light and easy to carry. It is not better overall.
Yes, sometimes things get screwed up and we get understandably frustrated, but that does not license revisionist history.
Bad example. I didn't need a smartphone for this task because there was a real live human being, who brought to the task all of the adaptability and intuition that modern systems lack. I didn't need Yelp, or Google Maps, or even the entire name of the business I was looking for. "I need the number to the printing company on the east side" was enough to get me a name, an address, and the call routed, without paying monthly bandwidth fees or spending seven hundred dollars on a pocket supercomputer.
Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot (sans bandwidth issues).
Worth the price? Sure, but to quote Pulp Fictoin, let's not start beating each other off just yet. There is plenty of room for improvement, and we've lost a lot of ground.
I used to be able to take a supersonic flight across the country, without having my body inspected via millimeter-wave radar.
Has anyone set foot on the moon in your lifetime?
OK, my example was simplistic. I want to find the best chicken tacos in San Francisco. I can't call directory enquiries for that - I have go find reviews. Then call to make a reservation at the place, then find driving directions of how to get there, somehow. In a paper road atlas? Am I having to advocate for the benefits of the internet on Hacker News?
> Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot
Well of course it was, it only had to run on one platform. Compatibility is a lot easier when that's the case. Today we have HD video being played on mobile devices in your pocket. I can't remember the last time I ran into a compatibility problem with online video.
> I used to be able to take a supersonic flight across the country, without having my body inspected via millimeter-wave radar.
That's a political decision, not a technical regression.
> Has anyone set foot on the moon in your lifetime?
No. Can I load, on demand, stunning satellite photography of planets orders of magnitude further away than the moon, on my phone, on the bus to work? You bet.
It's both. Private supersonic flights are no longer available, and it is more of a pain in the ass to get on the inferior flights that are available.
I could go on, but it's moot -- the only point I'm here to make is that progress always been paired with regression, and it's always going to be a personal decision as to whether the tradeoffs were good ones.
I have no idea and Yelp is not going to help. So, the fallback is I can ask some friends for advice and directions or use some companies best of list. But, again the internet did almost nothing in this space.
PS: I also had the internet on my phone in 2006 and yes they had maps. EX: http://www.forbes.com/2006/12/08/phones-music-internet-tech-...
> Realplayer sucked but it was about a thousand times more reliable than the current compatibility crapshoot.
So Vorbis/MP3 and WebM/H.264 is not good enough for compatibility over all the browsers?
Buffering....
Having so many apps constantly spitting unnecessary data out to trackers and heaven knows what isn't better. Neither is simple apps that can't cope when you go out of data coverage, which seems to be becoming more common.
I'd rather have gnome 2 than 3, I'd rather have Win 7 than 10 or XP. I don't consider any of them the pinnacle of design, but I don't think they're currently moving in a helpful direction either. There's been precious little progress or innovation in the OS space for years.
I'd rather have google talk, which was small, light, minimal and crucially reliable over hangouts or current skype.
We don't have apps that work offline? Maybe look around more. FFS half of the web apps i use work fine offline.
And claiming that there has been no innovation in the OS space for years is silly. There is plenty of innovation, it's just that people don't like change and will instantly reject something that isn't the same as what they are already using. FFS just look at stuff like the ip command or systemd in linux. People lament that it's the end of days because a command is different exactly because they want to innovate past the constraints of the old systems.
And if we are playing the "What i want is what is best" game...
I much prefer Windows 10 over linux now. It's gotten that nice and i'm tired of constantly fixing stuff on my workstation.
And I much prefer current hangouts to the old google talk plugin. "small", "light"? Did you ever use it. You needed to download and install 2 separate programs to get Google Talk video chat working. Sometimes you'd need to do some port forwarding bullshit just to get it to work.
Now i install chrome and sign in, and within a minute hangouts is installed and working.
Don't want to install chrome? Run it from a browser tab by going to https://hangouts.google.com/
Don't want to make a google account? You can video-chat with guests by sending them a unique link.
All of those things were impossible with the old google talk.
The Mail, Calendar and OneNote apps kept me hooked. But the lack of a decent terminal was killing me. Also, Skype didn't work properly half the time and the new "Video" and "Messaging" apps built on top of Skype were crashing 90% of the time.
Then your installation is clearly broken. No, it's not good, but let's not pretend these issues didn't exist in the "good old days".
OSX, iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows all have pretty big issues when doing upgrades.
There's the occasional odd package under Linux which remains installed and you need to manually remove it, but nothing unfixable. But I guess that depends more on the underlying OS structure. I'm looking forward to see more widespread usage of Snappy Ubuntu.
Since that is the main way people migrate to Windows 10, I would've expected them to be more careful with it.
RHEL only started supporting it for the transition between 6 and 7 on a like 3 architectures on one edition.
And OSX has it's share of issues. For me personally, updating to El Capitan was the worst upgrade processes i've done in recent memory. From not running the installer but giving no issues, to not finding the harddrive during the install process, to corrupting the current install of yosemite, to bluetooth being broken after the upgrade, and i can't get wifi speeds over 1mbps.
A clean install solved all of that, but that's pretty normal with every single OS i've ever encountered.
It's not a question of being "more careful", it's that writing software in a way that it can be in-place upgraded to something you don't know will exist at the time is EXTREMELY HARD! I really feel it's one of the big "unsolved problems" in computer science and i don't see it being solved any time soon.
I'm pretty sure the GP is referring to the native google talk client that gtalk was originally launched with. It was indeed a very simple jabber+sip client (by far the simplest of the major available clients) and had a tiny memory footprint. It did nothing but chat and voice calls.
It looked like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/75/Google_talk.g...
It just seems like people will rewrite history. It was cumbersome, had strange scaling issues on many of my PCs at the time, didn't work on macs, you needed to just do it yourself on linux (and i'm not even sure if videochat worked on linux...).
I'm pretty sure it was also before google even had TFA.
compare something simple as enabling a network card using ifconfig vs using ip, as you can easily tell the difference. You end up 3 layers deep before you can even enter the card id you want to do anything with!
When seasoned kernel devs don't want to touch a tool, warning lights should come on.
When it's not something you want, it's to "Placate people". But if it was something you wanted, i'm sure it would be a welcome feature!
And it's not that complicated, just different.
Want a "traditional" list of interfaces? `ip addr`
Want to list running interfaces? `ip link ls up`
Want to set a device up/down? `ip link set dev {DEVICE} {up|down}`
Quick question! How do you set the MTU length in a legacy REHL system? Because with ip it's just `ip link set mtu 9000 dev eth0`!
Yeah, its new and will require some learning, but it's not inherently bad...
And talking about seasoned kernel devs, name one time that there wasn't a minority of kernel devs bitching about a new feature! Every change is going to make some people worse off.
As for devs, Torvalds didn't have much love for the ip command last time i looked into things. And a year or so back i ran into a Ts'o posting about his dislike for polkit (a close cousin of systemd).
It's not change that people don't like, it's the mountains of randomly missing features, settings and control remotely subverted away from the system owner, tons of software no longer working, a terrible UI nobody asked for. Who wants 10 steps of innovation forward if it comes bundled with 1,000 undocumented steps backward?
Web pages have become bloated, but they load faster on my phone now than they did on the desktop that I had in 2005.
There are many frustrating things occuring with development now, but it is crazy to say that ten years ago was objectively better.
Not everything; cars today are a big improvement over cars 10 years ago, and especially cars 20 years ago. Just in the last 10 years, cars have made huge improvements in fuel economy alone. Cars have gotten really good for the most part. Some article I recently read on an auto blog, about the "10 worst" cars, even complained that modern cars are so great now that their picks were really just about which ones were the worst values relative to their competition, and that, unlike in past ages, they couldn't point to any true stinkers.
Also, I think mobile phone software is generally better now than 10 years ago. 10 years ago the iPhone was brand new, and most people still used crappy feature phones running things like BREW. They just didn't give you the capabilities that modern phones do. Some people complain that newer phones have poorer call quality than old flip-phones, but personally talking on the phone is one of the least-used features. I spend a lot more time using it for texting, photos, voice mail, and various apps (taking notes, calculator, playing games, Tinder, etc.).
However, in the software world, I will readily agree that most PC-based software was far, far better 10 years ago than today. PC-based software in the last 5 years has really, really gone down the toilet. Windows 8/10 are a prime example here, but even Linux distros really aren't doing that great either. The web is a horror show, with every site full of dozens of JavaScript scripts running, mainly for spying/tracking purposes. I don't even agree that the web is prettier; too many sites are mobile-centric, and look stupid on a regular PC screen.
I can't find a replacement "modern" car.
The whole problem with them is that they're dangerous as hell, and offer zero benefit, and only drawbacks.
They're dangerous because they encourage people, by supposedly being "automatic", to not buckle up. They're not effective if you don't buckle the lap belt, but during that time lots of people didn't, because they thought it wasn't necessary. After all, what's the point of an "automatic seatbelt" if you still have to manually buckle part of it?
So, if you're going to go to the trouble of buckling the lap belt to get full effectiveness, what exactly is the benefit over having a normal 3-point belt? There is none.
Finally, the belts were a total hindrance if you got in your car with anything in your hands, such as a briefcase or purse or bag. Anyone driving alone (as most of the population does most of the time) and carrying something frequently just jumps in the front seat holding the bag, and puts it in the passenger seat or floor. With the mousebelt in the way, this became a good way to get tangled up.
If you're still driving that piece of shit, do yourself a favor and get a newer car. That thing has no airbags and has terrible crashworthiness compared to anything newer than 25 years old. You're very likely to die in a crash in that car, which in a new car you would walk away from.
In my observation, this has certainly been the trend.
In my experience, in this climate you have to look harder to find it user-focused software, and to some extent you have to write some of it yourself.
This is because the software world has been flooded with "easy to use" programs that are either located on third party computers or must automatically connect to third party computers in order to be useful.
To be truthful, I'm not sure that many users of today, i.e., younger ones, really understand what we mean by user-centric and user-focused. They may think if something is made "easy" for them, then it's user-focused.
But where computer software is involved, we've seen it is precisely the opposite. If users want more control then they have to endure a little inconvenience, at least in the short term.
The easier and more "frictionless" the software, the more the user should understand that the software has not been written so much for their benefit as for someone else's.
When MS bought it everything went to shit. Still had the problems with messaging/sync but if you had a surface pro it'd be impossible to send files or share contacts on the preinstalled metro app which IMO is a pretty fucking basic feature. Worse yet it prevented you from being able to install the regular desktop client and the Android version couldn't start group calls so I had to use two fucking computers just to use it like before.
And the stupid notifications will pull you out of a game too because for some reason they're still clickable when you're full screen.
They eventually banned Skype on any machine connected to the network with prejudice. This impacted international research projects as Skype had been saving a ton of international comm. money to that point.
And, as usual, those who have a gripe are loud. I use Skype every day and I am never able to feign like I don't get messages from people. It never drops and it hits three devices at once. My digital leash serves its masters just fine...
But in this day and age, bad performance of apps are kind of "unacceptable". If it doesn't work right, something else will, and I'll have no problems abandoning the bad product. And guess what: Skype is shitty. I often get message notifications on my phone hours after they arrived on my desktop (that is, if I get a notification at all). It's slow and clunky and a pain to even start a call. I dread the thought of having to use it on my phone. I've asked to delay meetings so I could take them from my computer. Or even spend money on Google Voice and make that international call through the regular phone app. So, I abandoned it. I don't suggest Skype anymore to my contacts when I have a call. You know, "Ok, so I'll call you at 9am. Skype's good?". Not anymore. It's usually Hangouts.
This is not how these things are supposed to be.
The only time Skype worked for me was on a Nokia N800. It actually worked so well that it delayed my mobile phone adoption for a year. It just worked. Enter this decade where I think I paid for a subscription for almost 4 years and maybe got one or two good calls on other devices during the whole stint.
Messaging systems seemed to work so much better last decade when they were still P2P. I maintained real relationships on them as opposed to no one ever being online on Skype and the shame that is Facebook.
Yeah, I suspect it was originally written by people who knew what they were doing and now it has gone through years bottom-dollar maintenance to cut engineering costs.
"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 capability of capturing peer-to-peer Skype communications—meaning that the NSA gained the ability to capture peer-to-peer traffic and decrypt it using keys provided by Microsoft through the PRISM warrant request."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/newly-published-n...
However, the network effect is strong with this one, so it is impractical to make the switch.
What? There are secure text-only clients, but voice/video/group video? Where is the more secure version of those? Or is this going to go down the road of "set up your own VoIP service" again?
People always say there are tons of alternatives to Skype... Where are these alternatives and why aren't they popular?
This is a scary thought, and I realize I'm increasingly feeling the same way everyday.
This is a nice thought, but probably not realistic for a variety of reasons. Perhaps most relevantly, I would expect that a large quantity of major Tor exit nodes are tapped by the NSA.
I would also expect that most servers you talk to are either already tapped by NSA in one way or another or can be tapped by the NSA trivially if they decide they want to see what's happening.
The attack is effective if the adversary is setting up its own fake websites and then luring users in (with child porn, etc.), correlating their traffic. But for hot services, like Gmail, even if the NSA has the potential to track Gmail's traffic, the noise and the false positives are too great.
And for services outside of the US jurisdiction, the NSA isn't able to legally coerce companies into giving them the keys needed for mass surveillance. Sure, they can reach agreements with local intelligence agencies for wiretapping and exchanging of information, but it would be an international disaster if it got out that foreign companies were forced through legal means by an US agency to hand over control. And this extends somewhat even to US-hosted servers of foreign companies. Yes they have physical access to US-based servers, no, it's not necessarily easy for them.
What this means is that the NSA is not able to control and measure many popular Internet services. It's also all a matter of cost. Raise the cost significantly and it will get too expensive to do mass-surveillance, even for the NSA.
Of course, if they target you directly, then all bets are off. Though in such a case they can just wiretap your home and office and hear everything you do or speak. But in the meantime if I use apps like Signal for communications, or PGP for my very private email, or SSL for connecting to my web server, I can be sure that the NSA is not tracking me because I'm not a target, I'm not a US citizen, I'm not interesting and it's probably expensive for them to track me through those channels.
Don't expect that just because you are using PGP for email or OTR that NSA can't read your shit if they put their mind to it - but it's extremely unlikely that they will, and nothing would protect against it. It's a noble cause to use encryption, to stop yourself from intentionally giving data to anyone with a promiscuous WiFi card and broadcasting "please steal this" to anyone that can. You are choosing to give the NSA all your data.
Using an encrypted alternative to Skype also prevents Microsoft from Big Brother-ing you, too. It's not just the NSA, but Microsoft selling personal information to advertisers or collecting analytic data that you have every right not to provide.
1) old laptops from ebay(probably paid $100 for each) 2) microsoft 3000 webcam 3) linux.
Each laptop was configured with its own skype account, would start it on boot, audio out completely disabled, and set to pick up calls from friends automatically.
Why not use a regular CCTV solution? I knew I could call that skype client from anywhere in the world, even from my phone, and I would get very good quality sound and video. I've had "networked" CCTV cameras which were $1000+ and they had choppy video and barely audible audio, plus you had to do some sort of dyndns solution to access them everywhere.
That solution, unless you haven't told the whole story, doens't record anything, so unless I'm watching closely just when they're robbing my hose it will be all for naught.
It was mostly to have a live preview from few locations, accessible anywhere, with sound. It wasn't used to stop thieves :-)
* 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 Hangouts has much lower audio lag, doesn't kick out people constantly even when screen sharing, etc
* Is now owned by Microsoft
* Never cared about privacy or security (not that Hangouts does, but Skype just sets a very very low precedent)
* Group Messaging is a mess
* Individual Messaging is a mess
The list goes on and on. Its 2016, and "Let's Skype" is not cool anymore. There are much better options available.
It also freezes, a LOT. We finally forced our manager to let us use Slack and we love it.
* No desktop client
* Connected to your google account meaning I'll need to juggle several google accounts to keep my personal and business chats separate
Just the fact it doesn't have a native desktop client makes it unusable. I know there are workarounds I can use like nativefier but it's still not as smooth as a desktop app.
Running in the browser:
- Gets grouped with my other browser windows in my taskbar, making it hard to find
- Notifications might or might not work, depending on firefox's whims
- If for any reason firefox crashes all your communication crashes with it
- Susceptible to every single browser bug that allows silent loading of extensions that scrape all your data
These problems are largely resolved by using chrome. Pop out any tab into its own window, notifications will work reliably, the security model is far stronger, and most important of all: when one tab crashes, it's an independent process so it can't take any other tab with it.
I use this every day without seeing any of these issues.
At some point, life started imitating art.
Seeing the level of shitty ported Linux programs I see this as a pro.
> Connected to your google account meaning I'll need to juggle several google accounts to keep my personal and business chats separate
This would be easier with Skype if you have 2 Skype accounts?
When using Chrome:
> - Gets grouped with my other browser windows in my taskbar, making it hard to find
Menu -> More tools -> Add to desktop
to some extent. depending on how you start a hangouts, you have no idea what account it's going to start under. The number of times I've gotten on a work call on my personal account because google felt it should use that one
> Seeing the level of shitty ported Linux programs I see this as a pro.
Well, google manages to make a shitty Linux port of the plugin, so they've got their bases covered there.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=363358
That said, it's still far inferior to any commercial videoconferencing product I've ever seen. Literally, the only advantages are cost & integration with other Google services (which is only an advantage if you're already a Google Apps customer).
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 eliminate big companies' products?
And even if it were so: the product as it is today was mostly developed while it wasn't even under Microsoft.
Besides, even if everyone at Microsoft has changed attitude that's no excuse. Microsoft has had five years since the acquisition of Skype in 2011. Isn't it, by now, time to stop blaming their predecessors and own up to the current state of affairs?
Consider yourself lucky, for me screen sharing doesn't seem to work at all.
I, frankly haven't found Hangouts much better. We've all but given up on them and use a combo of a free-ish conference app like Uber Conference and Join.Me, Slack, and FaceTime for audio. Except for the one guy with Android, that I then wind up actually having to call from my phone. Ugh, who wants to use a phone these days?
What? That is simply not true, the Kernel never breaks userspace. And "version combinations" are solved by linking statically.
I feel like you're talking about GTK and Qt, both of which (don't break userspace either) are libraries you can statically link and nothing will break.
sure you can have bunch of ifdef in the code, and an autoconf, and make sure you support a wide set of options, but that is basically the whole point, it makes for a painful experience and costlier, slower development (for closed source application that comes prepackaged)
or just go get some old static compiled stuff run on your modern distro and see yourself. like, mindrover the europa project port.
> static linked on a kde library that had widget, new one doesn't have that nor a fallback, application crashes.
As I said before, please read up on what static linking means.
> like, mindrover the europa project port.
$ file Mindrover\ The\ Europa\ Project\ DEMO\ r1-lgp-x86.run
Mindrover The Europa Project DEMO r1-lgp-x86.run: ELF 32-bit LSB executable,
Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2,
for GNU/Linux 2.6.15, BuildID[sha1]=fe926b7ea13be61d05cdd605e313f50042040153, stripped
$ ldd Mindrover\ The\ Europa\ Project\ DEMO\ r1-lgp-x86.run
linux-gate.so.1 => (0xf7722000)
libglib-2.0.so.0 => not found
libz.so.1 => not found
libfuse.so.2 => not found
librt.so.1 => /lib32/librt.so.1 (0xf7700000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib32/libdl.so.2 (0xf76fb000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib32/libpthread.so.0 (0xf76dd000)
libc.so.6 => /lib32/libc.so.6 (0xf7525000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x5660a000)
"Breaking userspace" probably is a misnomer, if only because userspace has a precise technical definition. This is more like changing an interpreted language without maintaining backwards compatibility (python3, anybody?) or changing a json API.
> with the ABI changing every year for no reason and yet having to support users having all kind of version combinations.
To which I originally replied. And my point here still stands. I'm not arguing about the backwards or forward compatibility of every single library that might or might not use an IPC mechanism to talk to another component which could break if they're different versions.
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.
not rocket science either, but that stuff does carry an increased cost
update 1: https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Features It has encryption which cannot be disabled and the advanced audio features make it well suited for reliable and pleasant day to day use. It's low-latency and instead of a centrally managed contact database like most commercial services have Mumble uses certificates for authentication and identification of your friends across servers.
update 2: There are alternative server implementations, one in C and another one in Go, meant to run on OpenWRT in terms of hardware requirements.
I have poked around with Jitsi but its setup is too complicated for normal users.
Microsoft has been doing all sorts of cool things lately and it's odd that the Skype team hasn't been a part of this movement toward a modern, multi-platform world.
In my little corner of that world as the owner of an agency which spends money on Skype credit every day and uses Skype for a healthy part of our business communications, if Linux users start having trouble connecting to calls we are done with Skype immediately. There are enough alternatives out there nowadays that we will drop this tool.
I made a call this morning (6 hours ago) and it worked[0] at that time.
I'm not on the same machine right now, but it is a Debian 8 64-bit build. Just installing Skype was a total pain.
If there was a viable alternative that had all the services Skype offers (Skype-Out and local numbers as well as the usual video/voice calling) I'd switch to it. However, I also need to convince my 70 year old Mum, on the other side of the world, who still uses Windows XP, because she's "used to it", and doesn't own a smartphone to switch too.
I've just seen ring.cx mentioned above and might investigate further.
[0] Worked: The person on the other end could hear and see me.
If there was a cross-platform Skype clone that worked on OSX, Linux, Windows, iOS and Android that was stable and secure - the whole world would jump onto it. All it has to do is not be a bloated piece of crap like Skype.
Instead, everything else out there is fragmented.
We’re all waiting, get on it already!
Calls, group calls, chat, group chat, video, screenshare. For one communications client those are the boxes it needs to tick. Any suggestions?
- Private chat with one or more parties
- Open Group chat via channels (both private and public channels)
- Voice/Video via numerous integrations including Bluejeans, Appear.in, Skype, Hangouts, you name it.
- ChatOps via services like IFTT & Zapier or even your own custom bridge into your network.
- Get notifications right in Slack from your source control, build servers, JIRA, Confluence and any number of other services via webhook integrations.
- A billion other wicked cool integrations (https://slack.com/apps) that allow you to do just about anything, including the eternally useless, often inappropriate and highly amusing Giphy.
- It's free(ish)... the featureset is restricted on the free account, but it has enough to be useful to small startups even of adhoc members. For teams there is a small per user/per month charge which unlocks a wealth of enterprise ready features.
- It's searchable
Highly recommended and well worth a look for small and large teams alike.
Tox is getting there, but it doesn't appear to support asynchronous messaging that syncs later when some of the people in a chat are offline. If that's wrong let me know.
>XMPP does all of that.
That's like saying "TCP does all that". Would you like to name programs that support the full list?
>WebRTC does all of that.
As far as I can tell WebRTC has nothing to do with chat.
I don't actually use XMPP, but a quick Google gives a list that do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messagin... for example. Would you be upset if I said "IRC does that" if you asked for messaging? Why aren't you upset that I pointed at Tox, which is also a protocol with separate implementations? Your point about TCP, while meant to be a critism, is actually spot on: It is a protocol. Anyone can implement it and talk to all other XMPP (or Tox!) clients, unlike Skype which is completely proprietary and closed ecosystem. Pointing at only one client shows favoritism and is disingenuous, since you could point out "<x> doesn't implement <y>!" when another client does, while if it's supported in the protocol it CAN be support by any of the clients.
You're actually right about the WebRTC point: it inherently doesn't support text, it's for p2p signaling. Most implementations do have a textbox for communication, however, and have the same benefit as Tox or XMPP: It's a protocol. Just because one site doesn't do it, doesn't mean any other site can't and inter-op with all other providers.
You can get 90% of the benefit by having other clients in the chat act as relays for that chat. No centralization required. You'd only need a bouncer for specific situations, like mobile<->mobile chat with all desktop clients shut off.
>Would you be upset if I said "IRC does that" if you asked for messaging?
If I asked for just messaging, I would accept "IRC". But if I ask for video chat, and a tiny fraction of IRC clients did video chat, I would not accept "IRC" as an answer. If you want to name a protocol, the implementations need to have widespread support for the entire list of features. Theoretical support is not good enough. I agree that universal support is unnecessary, but widespread support is a must.
It looks like "XMPP+Jingle" is a pretty good answer, but I'd have to look into it more.
I assumed you were talking about one-on-one message relaying, which is probably what most people would care about. That can't really be solved, since one of the goals of Tox is also to prevent 3rd parties from being able to tell who you are talking to. Can't do that if you have to broadcast to users "send this message to <x> when they get back"...
And if you're looking for full conference room VC, https://www.google.com/work/chrome/devices/for-meetings/
Google uses Hangouts for all of these tasks internally, and in my experience it works well.
I like Hangouts, but for a bunch of reasons I want a desktop program, not a web program.
Seems like it could be a good base for a company to sponsor. They could make money on the back-end phone system fees.
What kind of problems did you have? Usually its just a matter of installing it, (optionally) make an account on the Linphone site and get it running.
'Desktop version':
- it is a Chrome App (arguably not a desktop client?)
- it in (restricted) beta, aka not available
- the beta requires (acc. to the link you provided) "your Google account email"
You can make voice calls with Signal, to other Signal users.
Given that they replaced Lync/Skype for Business™ I assume they ideally want a comparable offering: Voice and chat for a number of platforms.
Signal would give you voice on mobiles only and chat on mobiles only, ignoring the Chrome App beta thing.
I might be entirely wrong, but I assumed that the GP chose Telegram for now due to the multi-platform support (chat on all platforms, replacing Lync/Skype in that regard completely). If that is correct, moving to Signal would be a trade-off, exchanging multi-platform support for voice calls. It's not a solution, it's a different subset of Lync's/Skype's feature set
You can go the other way around and "build" it. Just clone their repo and point Chrome to the cloned directory so that it knows that there's an unsigned extension there. Done.
Once on of your contact uninstall Signal without disabling it first, you will have to long press the send button EACH time you want to text them. Annoying as hell, it made me stop using Signal.
My two cents about alternatives: appear.in Not so good with connection establishment, but works fine most of the cases.
I recently saw how all my friends moved to Telegram, and this is nice. But for instance my company has daily skype calls, and I have to get skype for those.
I eventually decided to give it up on my (Linux) laptop and get the calls only on Android, where it still sucks, but at least it works.
All my friends are on Whatsapp, and this is not nice... I'm going to try to convert them to Telegram., not easy.
I'm not. I'm just saying that the majority of my friends are using it. For me it's better than skype and whatsapp. The GNU/Linux client works fine (although I'm not a big fan of its codebase: I had a look at it and guess what…)
Or ...Telegram (search in that page for "Telegram (secret chats)")
- good persistent group chat - good voice quality - single contact list & app for voice+text chat - free (beer)
I finally caved a few months ago, got an account, and started using it ("oh wow it handles 's/woops/fixed/', that's awesome")... until the client began freezing, chewing 100% CPU for as long as I patiently left it running, and not getting itself sorted out. Removing ~/.Skype (XDG, anybody?) and re-signing in worked... for about 3 minutes, at which point my profile data re-synced, and the client began choking again.
Last I tried the Web-integrated version (Skype icon, top-right of outlook.com et. al., takes a minute to become clickable) I couldn't even type "/me ..." - the line would send verbatim. At that point I gave up completely.
I used to use IRC but I find it too Spartan nowadays, but on the other hand I don't want to have to remember what chat tab is in what window, and I can't handle the idea of running 15 isolated instances of Webkit for all the separate chat systems out there, so that kills websites and most current "desktop" chat clients.
I don't use the Internet to communicate much, somewhat ironically. Everything drives me to distraction.
Notes:
- XDG: TL;DR = says stuff should be in ~/.config, ~/.cache, etc. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory_supp...
- I cannot help but admire the reverse-engineering going on at https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypewe... to make the outlook/skype web integration programmatically consumable. I have no idea how it works but the commits are very recent, which is a big positive sign.
The same happens for me on iOS and OS X quite often. I disabled mobile data and push notifcations on iOS as it sucked up tonnes of data (I've seen 30MB/day even when I haven't opened the app), and repeated or delayed notifications. Whenever I open a conversation I have to leave it 30s - 1 minute until it updates with the latest messages.
I have to admit, searching for "skype 100% cpu" or similar shows lots of people having this problem on Windows and OS X, so I wonder if I'm not just seeing disasterousness in a shared part of the codebase.
I never even touched the mobile app though; 30MB/day is insane. Wow...
XDGBDS is such an unstandard even xdg-utils doesn't care for it. And Skype predates XDGBDS (let alone whatever the current version of XDGBDS is this week).
Also you're wrong, XDG doesn't say stuff should be in specific directories, it defines envvars specifying directories with various defaults, defaults which are at best only correct on Linux distros which purport to follow XDG, which you can't test for because XDGBDS didn't see fit to define a way to say it.
:o, TIL
> And Skype predates XDGBDS (let alone whatever the current version of XDGBDS is this week).
Of course, but that's no real excuse for it not to get with the times.
> Also you're wrong, XDG doesn't say stuff should be in specific directories, it defines envvars specifying directories with various defaults,
you are of course right; I overly-condensed my TL;DR. Those are the default directories, yes, but it defines XDG_CONFIG_HOME (~/.config), XDG_CACHE_HOME (~/.cache), etc.
> defaults which are at best only correct on Linux distros which purport to follow XDG, which you can't test for because XDGBDS didn't see fit to define a way to say it.
Another TIL... and that's just crazy.
What about OS policy being that "all shell environments shall be supplied with stock configuration that defines the XDG environment envvars as a sign of compatibility and compliance"? Keep them at ~/.config et al., just define them - because if they're defined, that indicates the environment is very likely to be sanely configured (for (stereo)typical values of "sane").
It is a very good excuse: Backwards compatibility with older installations.
I suppose it could have two search paths, but why add complexity?
The web client works well enough for chat so I can talk to my friends who don't want to move away from it.
It does however not support calls since for some reason it needs a browser plugin for that. WebRTC would clearly be too easy. So I just link people a Firefox Hello link whenever they want to use voice.
I haven't been on Windoze since I don't know how long. And the Mac Client is superb. Linux client, absolute desaster, indeed.
But still, this has absolutely nothing to do with Bill.
And to be honest, the Linux client disgrace predates Microsoft take over.
I then refused to upgrade until I got daily notifications that my old version would be disabled from connecting.
I upgraded, as forced, and that was the last time I was able to make calls or do screen sharing.
Chat still works.
It worked before Microsoft, it did not work after Microsoft.
I've been using Slack (https://slack.com/) for a while too... it does everything useful that you could ask of a chat application and works very much like IRC worked back in the day. Everything it doesn't do natively, there's an integration for, just like with IRC bots.
You can do:
- Private chat with one or more parties
- Open Group chat via channels (both private and public channels)
- Voice/Video via numerous integrations including Bluejeans, Appear.in, Skype, Hangouts, you name it.
- ChatOps via services like IFTT & Zapier or even your own custom bridge into your network.
- Get notifications right in Slack from your source control, build servers, JIRA, Confluence and any number of other services via webhook integrations.
- A billion other wicked cool integrations (https://slack.com/apps) that allow you to do just about anything, including the eternally useless, often inappropriate and highly amusing Giphy.
- It's free(ish)... the featureset is restricted on the free account, but even with the free account it has enough to be seriously useful to even loosely defined teams of adhoc members. For enterprise requirements there is a small per user/per month charge which unlocks a wealth of enterprise ready features.
- It's archivable & searchable
Highly recommended and well worth a look for small and large teams alike.
It's more targeted at teams, but for circles of friends, it works nicely too. Because of the way it's structured, it works more like a web based, centrally hosted IRC server than Skype, as such it doesn't really have the same network effect, but it's so much more flexible than Skype in every other respect.
For instance, to get everyone into a Join.Me conference I just copy/paste the link into the channel and people connect from their browser/desktop app/phone app- but it would've been the same with email.
I feel like the audio/video is the one place where Slack doesn't really add value to the flow, other than what Slack already does- makes it easier to give the connection info to your group/channel.
The free tier has a very limited history, which defeats the point of using Slack, since you lose your history. And there's really no point in using Slack if you don't have a history you can rely on, might as well use IRC.
And once you start paying, $7-$15 per user/month is not what I'd call cheap. It's cheap compared to a salary, but such costs pile up.
> Voice/Video via numerous integrations including Bluejeans, Appear.in, Skype, Hangouts, you name it.
Which is another way of saying that it doesn't solve the problems that Skype does, so it's not an alternative.
Worse: For IRC you can use quassel (self-hosted) or IRCCloud (4$/month).
So with IRC you get more, but even cheaper.
When you're not in channel on IRC, you don't have access to anything that was said prior to joining the channel which means you don't even have any immediate history, or context to a conversation that is ongoing when you join. At least with Slack you have 10,000 messages of history, which is at least enough to give you the context of the discussion.
Also while probably irrelevant on a technical level, it's just not as pretty and user friendly as Slack.
The only issue with IRC is discoverability.
The joy of adhoc plugins is that you don't need any specific one to get the benefits. It's like a directory of alternatives to Skype that all do an appropriate job. It's more discoverable than say trying to find an alternative to Skype via a Google search. New apps/integrations are added daily, giving you visibility to alternatives every day.
That seems a bit of a strawman considering we're talking about Slack as an alternative to Skype which brings the non-limited history for free.
I've used Skype for years, and I can honestly tell you that while Skype may have an unlimited history. In practice, that unlimited history is a pain in the ass to search, to the point that it may as well not have unlimited history. So from my perspective I'd equally say that the "non-limited history for free" of Skype is an equally straw-man argument.
They used to have bot integration which was awesome and allowed us to pipe information in and out from our other systems, but they terminated bot integration which was a huge nail in the coffin for us.
I'm slowly trying to convince my coworkers to move from Skype to our Slack instance.
Family: Wife (mac), Mom(ubuntu) and Sister(win) All - Family = work or business (i can safely say that 90% are OS from MS).
Do I want all those contacts in my slack ? No i don't.
Do I want to change to another very powerful chat system? Well, sometimes connect sqlite3 to find a conversation is not really what i want to do but the problem is to use chat system as storage for important communication so, No I don't what another shitty chat system.
My "rest folder" contains current work, future work, very good and bad work experiences from the past and maybe unplanned new jobs.
People are still there in green every morning cause they may want support or want to give jobs and after they pay they tends to use less email and more (shitty) chat systems.
In my case skype is only for work and i don't what to confuse the clear skype sound in my phone with something else that the work. Remove those contacts today means lose money tomorrow, i cannot remove that program and it is immediately installed after vim and git.
So after declaring to be a slave of skype like many others, I don't ask microsoft to change it, to fix it, to improve it or do it more cool or modern. I ask for my freedom: We need public, usable and having a sane license API to build something _better_ around it and remove that green icon from the status bar or my GNU/Linux Mint.
That's what we are trying to achieve with Matrix (https://matrix.org) - making apps connect either natively or via gateways/bridges.
We already have bridges to IRC, Slack, and libpurple! Ideally we would connect all services to each other, but obvs we can only do so for those who offer an API.
In Matrix, you can set up a WebRTC call with any Matrix-user, and the user can take the call in whatever Matrix-client he wants. We already have open source clients for web, iOS and Android!
will look at that but still, in this moment and with the current api of skype, an instance of it must run in background somewhere.
The client is trash, though. Never understood why you can't run multiple accounts, or at least multiple instances without massive hoop-jumping. Aside from some reskins, it's the same as the Lync 2013 client, and that wasn't much of a change on the 2010, or even 2007 client.
I currently use https://tel.red/ to connect to Lync / "Skype for Business" on Linux. I wonder if that's a possible solution?
Also, from my experiences, it needs a more powerful computer to run smoothly.
Back then there was almost no video HW acceleration in hangouts anyhow (well in Chrome) not on the silly 1st gen Atom for sure and it still worked fairly well (at about 60% CPU usage IIRC) even with the 720p camera on the EEE PC.
And it's not that Skype would be any better in that regards Skype might have slightly bigger selection of video codecs (Google probably had too back when Google Talk had actually a thick client) but Hangouts is limited more or less to video streams that Chrome can handle which usually means current web video formats.
Lync (their custom, completely incompatibile VOIP solution sold to -- idiots, essentially) only works half-decently on windows. There's an OSX option, but it's just a factual checklist on the product spec, as in reality it's garbage.
The best part, is that "skype for business" actually lowers the quality of the product even more. I had my own set of issues with Lync, but it just doubled since we had to transition.
And that's for the "business" side.
It's really helpful.
XMPP with http://swift.im/ and http://conversations.im/ is much more pleasant.
* Doesn't integrate with Keychain, so I always have to login. * When logging in, pressing TAB when in the username field submits the form rather then go to password field. * Now I've failed my login enough that I need to reset my password. And Live doesn't let me reuse an old password, guaranteeing I'll lock myself out next time. * Even better, my Xbox won't login in now, so I either have to do this stupid dance again, or just use the Playstation.
Hmmm... My Linux client just made a successful voice & video call to an OSX Skype client.
While it would be nice if Skype was properly maintained, I'm not sure quite what the "unable to join calls" bit is all about.
If one really wants to install skype on a 64 bits debian, they need to apply loads of tricks (and risk to bork their system in the process).
Last time I attempted that, the package installer prompted me to first uninstall X - the window system - (amongst a whole lot of other crucial software) as incompatible dependencies...
Well, if they are too few and far between compared to Windows, OS X, iOS and Android then it makes sense. Opportunity cost et al.
And, while it's often brought up, I think that when it comes to consumer products (as opposed to server and dev stuff) Linux users don't really have some kind of "extra-influence" to compensate for being a niche group.
It's a nice FOSS alternative for group calling.
I set up Jitsi to do point to point (encrypted) video between two of our offices to replace Skype, and it worked fantastic.
My current daily means of communication on Linux is Google Voice/Hangouts, but I've also used others over the years, like GnomeMeeting/Ekiga, TeamViewer, and TeamSpeak. They've all worked fairly easily and without issue. With all the options, could someone explain why Skype matters?
As in not well at all and whenever any progress has been made with computing speed the Skype team have refactored their app to perform just as poorly on the new hardware.
Also why is the "Skype Home" part of the app just a facebook advert? I don't have an FB account so Skype tells me to get one every time I open it. Seemingly FB is more important than my contacts.
Also, there are project managers in my industry who check availability of freelancers via Skype, rather than email. Remaining logged in keeps you visible with them. I don't do it, and I find it a shame that this is the state of affairs.
That's my situation, so I get to run a Skype client in addition to Google Changouts, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, and IRC.
I'll give you an example. When Skype goes down, nobody bats an eye. They just wait for it to start working again. When Tox (or to be more precise, qTox) behaves unexpectedly in a single situation, people come to me and say: "It's shit." (literally, no explanation whatsoever).
Since everyone's using it, they think of positively even when it behaves like a complete garbage.
To be fair, Hangouts has gotten a bit better, but it still feels like there's nobody actually actively working on any of the apps. Or at least, nobody who is working on the app dogfoods it. But this app is no stranger to ignoring your microphone, or showing you that you're still in a conversation which has ended several hours ago.
Facebook Messenger has not disappointed me yet, which might make it the strongest and most stable contender to date.
The client sucks, but it ain't unusable.
Screensharing is my biggest concern, it does not work. I can't see other people sharing screens.
Better than all this modern crap
So at the time I bought the cheapest Android phone I could find and used it just for Skype, it didnt even have a sim card. And I was always easy to reach for coworkers.
Hopefully this helps someone else in the same position. Luckily I dont have to use Skype anymore.
Also the background colours of messages are bugged, sometimes my messages are grey, instead of being blue as they should be.
What the fuck?
(In fact the latter points to some color-code of sorts, e.g. grey = message hasn't been received yet, etc).
Yes, better than Windows client, at least when ran on Windows 10.
I also use Linux.
The net result is that Skype is not how this happens. I usually just offer Google Hangouts as an alternative or phone the person.
What's with "ThanksBill" - meaning Bill Gates? What has he had anything to do with modern Microsoft for the past decade?
My colleague using Ubuntu managed to join a call I made to her with no issue. There must be more to it I guess.
The beauty with this one is that you don't need an account, you just send a invitation link via slack or mail
https://sameroom.io/attend lets you auto-create Slack channels for each incoming Skype conversation.
We have some individual use discounts - just ask in support.
Their strategy, obviously, is still platform lock-in.
[1] http://liliputing.com/2016/02/intels-android-smartphone-prot...
[2] http://venturebeat.com/2016/02/16/mobile-devices-will-be-mor...
There is a solution - Cisco Jabber. They have a hosted solution now. I can't find a link currently and I haven't used it since we have it on-premise. But I did talk with someone recently who worked on their cloud product.
I keep having inability to join calls, getting stuck in calls and at worst even having the client say I'm not in any calls and no sound coming out of my speakers while others can still see me in the call and hear my microphone.
Of course when you can't make calls anymore, it might be time to update the failing component...
User of XMPP (Jabber) with transport to Skype.
They are known to use state of the art codecs so most likely the issue lies in the PSTN network that you are calling into.
For the out calling feature they are relying on Carriers all around the world for the VoIP -> PSTN functionality.
It would be another thing if you said that VoIP -> VoIP quality has dropped, here Skype has somewhat more control, although still not perfect control as they rely on the quality of Internet connection between caller and callee.
They can control one part of it, the point where their VoIP is transcoded and switched into the network, here could lie the issue. But the issue could also come from the destination end of the network.
I generally believe that US and EU carriers are solid enough that calling there shouldn't cause issues, but who knows whom the parent is calling.
Could be Afghanistan for all I know and I am not as confident here that there wont be any issues that are definitely out of control for Skype.
In some cases the carrier might even wilfully degrade the quality because they want to earn more. They earn less if Skype routes a caller from the US to Afghanistan via IP and lets him call from a Afghan to Afghan number.
Secondly webrtc requires you to coordinate, it's not like I can just call someone. Just as well we could use TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or any of the old solutions.
I much prefer Hangouts over Skype though, plus it performs very well on Ubuntu, unlike Skype.
Group calls are the only thing I use Skype for...
Web skype is my fail-safe, but of course it will have no audio or video.
All 234 of them!
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...
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).