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Re: [LUG] Skype Beta

 

On 06/03/17 21:51, Ian Dickinson wrote:
> Yep. Use it most days to join our team's remote daily stand-ups. The
> new beta is way better than the old Skype client, except in one
> crucial respect (see below). Interconnects well with the new-protocol
> Skype clients on Macs and Windows PCs. I'm on Ubuntu 16.10, and so far
> it hasn't actually crashed on me once. Occasionally we get
> bandwidth-related noise or video dropouts, but to be fair that happens
> on all VOIP clients as far as I can tell.

Yes, as I understood it Skype > Skype calls working again from Linux was
a major feature for this beta release.

> The most recent beta update added back in PSTN dialling, which wasn't
> present in the alpha releases. This also works well .... for
> connecting to a phone number. After that, I can't get it to generate
> DTMF tones, which makes it basically useless for "Please enter your
> conference code now" meet-me services. So still some way to go for
> feature-parity with the Mac/Win clients, but at least it's moving in
> the right direction. Which frankly is a relief - the old Linux client
> was beginning to look a lot like abandonware.

And there's the dealbreaker. This was exactly the sort of thing I was
asking about so thanks very much for saving me the time of having to
find this out for myself!

> I'm no Microsoft fan, but I can't fault them for having restarted
> investment in what must be a pretty tiny percentage of their overall
> market.

Meh, it's all self-interest and they're obviously figuring out how to
monetize it in some (any?) and probably objectionable way... Judging by
the sheer lack of progress I *am* going to fault them on this - WSL,
Hyper-V extensions and Azure integration are all sure signs that
Microsoft actually understands Linux pretty well and when it suits them,
they can easily mobilise a small army of devs to get Stuff Done(tm). For
whatever reason they apparently don't consider Skype on Linux to be
worth it. In fact, it's looking increasingly like they don't consider
Skype to be worth much, at least at face value - it doesn't work well on
any platform currently.

Anyway, thanks for the info.

Cheers

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