/u/AnAwesomeMiner pointed out that [retroshare](http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/downloads.html) has almost the same feature-set as skype while offering a bunch of cool new stuff! ----------------------------------------------------- So, I have 4 truly FOSS alternatives, depending on your use case: 1. The Talker: If you like to talk to groups and hear it clearly, use [Mumble](https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Main_Page). This is the **best** audio voice chat you can hope to get on a FOSS platform, bar none. This platform is perfect for people who want to create voice calls with multiple users, potentially while working on another project. Clients are available for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS. 2. The Jetson: For users that demand a video chat, [Jitsi](https://jitsi.org/) is FOSS software that solves your problem. It is pretty decent at videochat, and if you set up the Jitsi Meet server software, your friends can video chat with you using their web browsers. 3. The Collaborator: For users that regularly pass around files and snippets of data, [Mattermost](http://www.mattermost.org/) is a FOSS #slack clone that will let you collaborate quickly and efficiently. With Web, desktop, phone, and tablet apps available, this software is quick and easy for you to connect to your friends no matter what platform they are on. 4. The Hacker: [XMPP](http://xmpp.org/software/servers.html) is old as dirt and survives by being simple, clean, and reliable. There are an absurd number of XMPP clients and servers available for all platforms.

this sucks because you have people who insist on using this over hangouts or the alternatives....and then you hear .net core is linux and mssql is going linux...why not keep Skype linux....

Skype was dead to me when Microsoft bought it.

Skype4Pidgin whose web chat doesn't need a running Skype is waiting to get accepted since two weeks. https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/366993 You download the package manually.

Yeah, fuck Skype. My office unofficially uses it, since we don't have an official communicator. I stopped several months ago and we just set up a Slack for my team. I'm probably pissing off people in my office, but if they were really hard up to contact me, they can use email or Hangouts (our email service provider is Google Apps, so we all have Hangouts by default). I used their web client for a while (we mostly chat over IM) until I noticed that the only way to use voice was to use a plugin, and they didn't make a plugin for Linux. They just cut us off at every turn. Fuck Skype.

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Just to state the obvious for the purposes of commiseration: one feature I betcha no alternative will offer adequately: - make & receive solo & group calls to non-paying Skype users And that is an uphill battle Microsoft chose to drop in our laps. I was a paying Skype customer when MS bought it. I tried the only thing I know works: I kept paying and kept logging in every day with my Linux client. I kept tolerating the unchecked spam. I worked around their ungodly amateur use of Pulse forcing me to do voodoo if I wanted to game and use Skype at the same time. I live 20 minutes from Redmond. You guys want to really be infuriated? Try putting up with all this type of shit while living where everyone thinks you're an asshole if you don't like Microsoft.

tox has a few imperfections here an there but for the most part it works pretty well. Not unhappy to see skype dissaper tbh it was a piece of shit under linux even more so than on windows or osx.

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Under linux it is already for me. No way I'm installing 100s 32 bits libs...

Skype on Linux has been dead for weeks.

This is exactly what pisses me the most from microsoft, all these passive aggressive movements are just a pain in the ass. No linux user will ever switch back to windows because they can't call on skype, we just use another platform. This is exactly why I'm trying to migrate my community over to discord, not only is it just plain old better for the usage we give it (even though it doesn't have a linux client yet) but also we can use custom made python bots, and what does skype give us? Crashes on mobile because of how it stores image media. The biggest pain while moving people is usage inertia, moving a 100 active user community over to another platform is hard as FUCK, but we just can't trust microsoft to not fuck their own product up, we've seen it done way too many times. This is why I push for usage of Linux for servers down here in Argentina, Microsoft just keeps fucking up over and over again. Skype for winodws isn't much better either, as far as I've seen it (on a W8.1 machine, might be different on 10, I don't own one so I don't know) it's a half screen ad, that's really obnoxious. Now it might have been a W8.1 thing because the OSX version doesn't have the ads. I hate how people just put up with Microsoft's bullcrap just because that's "what they are used to". Platforms change over time, people have to move on and try something else, and when the people who actually know about tech tell you to move to something, you shouldn't disregard it because it's different, because chances are that those tech people tell you for a reason!

Has anyone found a workaround for this? I am required to use Skype for work, and I don't want to have to install Windows to do so.

What did you expect when Microsoft bought them? It was effectively the first thing they owned that natively ran on Linux.

Can anyone ELIF5? Skype is running normally on my Ubuntu14.04, what is broken? The group chats?

I haven't tried this, but would Skype for Android work on the Android SDK emulator under Linux?

Doesn't firefox have some kind of video calling functionality? Does anybody use that?

http://alternativeto.net/software/skype/?license=opensource&platform=linux there are great alternatives anyway edit: and also checkout [wire app] (https://app.wire.com) which is not listed there

The good side is that none of my friends ever updates Skype. The bad side is that they still want to use it while Hangouts is so much better.

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Does this only affect group calls? I haven't had an issue on ubuntu 16.04 or EL7.

I never had many people use Skype. But I really like Ring and am testing it with Friends that don't mind testing Beta-software. Head over to https://www.reddit.com/r/ringcx/ if you have questions.

The telepathy Skype client has had this problem for years now.

Yup

Good riddance.

The company I work for recently migrated away from Notes and Sametime to hosted Office 365 with Skype. Even on Windows, Skype is a terrible program. The options are severely limited to keep it from being intrusive. I'm pretty sure that's by design. Also, there's no chat history, but I don't know if that's something Microsoft removed, or a "security" option my company has selected. I remember Skype being cool, back in the old days, when I used it at a company where we were all on OS X. In my opinion, Microsoft's done Linux users a favor, and forced them to use something better. Maybe this will get Slack, or something similar, running at some more places.

Skype is crap. End of story. I wish more of the people I know realized that. I have started transitioning to Google Hangouts with most of my contacts from Skype. The rest I will soon just dump no matter what. Skype was, is and will be broken especially on Linux. Development time for this product is wasted for things like including idiotic animated images, small videos etc. into the chat messages, advertisement etc. etc. Even before Microsoft bought Skype it was a crappy piece of software but after the deal with Redmond sh@t hit the fan really hard and fast. Skype in a nutshell for Linux (most of the things below actually apply to all versions of Skype and are...platform-independent :D): - no updates for...1-2 years now? (even before the Microsoft era of Skype the Skype company didn't update their product that often especially compared to the Windows counterpart) - broken screen sharing - crashes every once in a while for no apparent reason (even when idle and not interacted with) - poor connection quality (no, I have pretty decent connection) - many times video chat is simply broken - notifications work...sometimes - poor audio quality - poor video quality - closed source - probably full with backdoors for NSA to spy on Skype users (it's Microsoft after all...) I strongly recommend that you try to convert as many of your Skype contacts to another VoIP software as possible and then simply remove it completely and forget about its existence. It will take a while but it's worth it and you will be doing other people a favour too by educating them how bad Skype is..Because it is. PS: I've read that Viber has just recently added encryption support for Linux too (previously Linux version was the only one that didn't have that and it was the major reason why I didn't use it). Might consider checking it out.

My Wife is a Viber freak & made me install it, I'm actually pretty happy with it.

I've been using skype on linux for a week now (wrapped in a docker container even) and it's been working fine. Audio, video, etc. It's not perfect (for some reason I can't send or receive wide screen video) but it definitely works.

Tox?

About god damn time.

I found that if i simply say "install TeamSpeak or we just won't be talking" i quickly found out which friends actually cared to speak with me. Once they realized how much better TeamSpeak was they then also stayed on it which forced others to install it or be alone.