[fnord123]

Title is "How Zoom works".

It's a good article with valid points but nothing about Skype.

The editorialized title "Turns out Zoom isn't all that different to Skype after all" has no appreciation for how hostile Skype's technology has become in the past 10 years. It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows to Electron beast that maybe works on Windows, could possibly be mining bitcoins on OS X (judging by how much it spins up the fans), and I think it stopped working on Linux altogether, replaced by a web client.

[abdullahkhalids]

The linux client does work. Its pretty bad, but the one redeeming feature that it has over Zoom is that I can turn off incoming video.

I am in a country with poor internet, and when no one is sharing their screen, I prefer to turn off incoming (and outgoing) video. Others can continue to benefit from seeing each other on video, while I get to talk and hear them properly.

[montroser]

We've switched from zoom to https://team.video and have been loving it.

They have a "low bandwidth" mode you can toggle on, that just turns off your outgoing and incoming video streams. I think it still tries to send around screen shares though, for better or worse.

It has made a huge difference for some team members with very challenged Internet connectivity where they can just put themselves in low bandwidth mode and the call carries on.

[waheoo]

This is why we use it.

Slack video chat is fine for most people in the US but having people international causss problems for slower connections.

Zoom just works.

Also, they actually respond to support requests when there was an issue with their linux build in the arch user repos they went out of their way to debug and resolve the problem.

This is soo much better contrasted agaisnt e.g. slacks response to a similar query, paraphrasing: hur just use the web client.

[chiefalchemist]

I looked but didn't see anything. Can you record meetings, and download them to edit, etc.?

[montroser]

Yes, you can record meetings and download the recordings. We have started just recording all our meetings so that if someone wasn't able to make it, they can just review at 2x speed later.

I looked again and I guess the low bandwidth setting is called "Bandwidth Saver" behind the little gear icon on the left hand side when you're in a call.

[bojan]

It's not just that the Linux client works, it's also getting updates every once in a while.

Unlike Teams client.

[coronadisaster]

10 years ago is about when Microsoft purchased Skype... If I remember correctly they received money from the government to do it and then stopped using the P2P supernodes model and switched to their own servers to track users more easily... It used to work great, I wish the pre-MS source code would get leaked.

[slau]

I remember being on a decent wired connection, working late in the office in London. All of a sudden, I got a call from the IT manager for Europe, who wanted my help to figure out which device was performing a DDoS or was part of a botnet. He had received alerts about the number of connections and the bandwidth.

After a few minutes, I realised he was talking about my laptop. I presume I had been promoted to a supernode thanks to my location and bandwidth. This was around 2009.

[jonathankoren]

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/skype-replaces-...

[mkl]

Part of the reason for the switch was more and more users on mobile devices, so the proportion of users that could act as supernodes got much smaller. I think I remember one of the Skype developers describing this in a comment on HN, but I can't find it now.

[huhtenberg]

> they received money from the government to do it

Got a source for this? Not that I find it hard to believe.

[coronadisaster]

I can't find it right now, but there's a bit of information regarding the NSA and MS here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/11/skype-ten...

[ew6082]

The Skype client of today is just a renamed Lync client, which actually used to be decent. They've done nothing but make it worse since Lync ceased to exist.

[TorKlingberg]

That's Skype for Business, which is completely different from Skype, and has now been deprecated in favour of Teams. Teams is again completely different from the Skypes, and is more of a Slack clone.

[jonathanstrange]

Skype was never a nicely working Qt program, I remember articles about their ultra-aggressive anti-reverse engineering coding techniques from 10 years ago or older. They used self-modifying code and undocumented opcodes, active prevention of debuggers and disassemblers, etc., basically every trick in the book to keep someone from finding out what Skype is actually doing.

[Erlich_Bachman]

But it worked... nicely. Meaning it did what it was supposed to do at least, quickly, with little resources, few bugs etc.

[michaelt]

I'm an Electron-hater in general, but are you forgetting the fact Skype for Linux didn't support group video calls until the Electron version?

[pmlnr]

This is simply not true.

[michaelt]

Then why do I see people from 2016 saying

> "Skype For Linux does not support group video calling" [1]

and articles from 2017 saying

> "The latest update to the Skype Linux client makes it possible to place group video calls on Linux, [...] Electron-based app [...] This is the first update to the popular VoIP app since Microsoft retired the Qt-based Skype 4.3 [2]

Plus I was personally there, trying to make group video calls from Linux in 2016. So I've seen this firsthand.

What makes you think what I say isn't true?

[1] https://www.quora.com/Can-I-make-and-join-group-calls-with-S... [2] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/07/skype-linux-now-lets-mak...

[buboard]

Thats no reason to switch to electon though

[apexalpha]

A few days back we were playing League of Legends and due to some permissions issue the person playing on Mac couldn't use the built in voice, so we swapped to Skype for a bit.

First: fans take off.

Second: Skype lowers all volumes of all other apps without asking.

Third: some people now have a weird floating bar in screen during the game, if clicked by accident the game minimizes.

Fourth: sound quality is horrible. How can a built-in, afterthought like Voice comms in LoL be better than a program written from the ground up to do voice calls?

Fifth: after the game ends the group has 3 spammers sending them a message since they logged into Skype.

Never again.

[mjul]

Regarding your second point, Windows 10 has a feature to lower the volume of other apps when it detects communication activity.

I got bitten by that using another VoIP client (not Skype).

[vultour]

How does one think "Hey let's use Skype" in 2020 is beyond me. There have been much better options for years.

[wildpeaks]

Try Discord if it happens again, it's great for gaming.

Personally I only keep Skype around for one specific customer.

[mywacaday]

Skype is dead in the water, has been suffering for years since the push to Teams started. Teams behaves a lot more stable in an enterprise environment, whether that is by design or neglect I'm not sure.

[Jestar342]

Teams is still woeful in both performance and features. Whilst you can easily drown in noise on slack, you are deafened by silence on teams. It is so difficult to discover channels and topics on Teams compared to slack, that I'm not sure there is a way to do it without being explicitly invited by an existing team member.

If you are using the mobile app then just lol. You'll always be seen as "away" even if actively engaging in discussions, and you'll be thinking you're caught in a time-trap with regards to accuracy of statuses and messages.

And my final rant is the pathetic conflation of "team" and "channel" nomenclature. The fuck is wrong with just calling them channels?

[fnord123]

Teams is also pretty snappy for the first month or so. But once you use it for about 8 months, it's just so painfully slow; it will take multiple seconds to switch channel. I suspect it's because they use sqlite under the hood for storing messages and have some bad queries or bad indexes.

[xxs]

Teams is a horrid, horrid product that eats tons of memory and has no history to speak of (takes like 15sec to load previous hour - on 300Mbit up/down connection). Dealing with large html paste is not even a bad joke. Making incoming calls on the phone, while chatting with another person on the pc is beyond any reason.

[mnw21cam]

Okay, try this one out. During a Teams call, open up the PulseAudio Volume Control application, which allows the volume to be set differently for each different application. Teams calls itself Skype.

[2rsf]

> Teams behaves a lot more stable in an enterprise environment, whether that is by design or neglect I'm not sure.

Teams is based (used to be shared code) on Skype For Bussiness, and it was designed to work better in office environments. A while ago they were struggling with the opposite- working over slower unreliable lines.

[Spidery]

RIP Skype.

[for_xyz]

"It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows to Electron beast that maybe works on Windows"

Skype was originally written in Delphi on Windows. Linux and OSX ports used QT.

Nowadays the Skype app is just single codebase written in React Native and it targets multiple platforms: UWP, Electron, Android and iOS.

[bad_user]

When I was on Linux, back in the glory days of Skype, I can tell you that it never worked well — if it worked at all, since I only remember it having support for one or two Ubuntu LTS versions and so on other distributions it was a Hail Mary event.

Nowadays you actually have a chance to make an audio call, even if you're not on the right Ubuntu LTS version.

And I've been using it on MacOS for the last couple of years. Not as a main communication channel, but it's a good meeting place and it supported video chats in our group of 10 people without issues, but granted I don't have experience with more than that.

[zekrioca]

It is crazy how much CPU on Linux Skype uses. And it used to be very light weight. I simply closed it to avoid making my computer slower. And I only open it when in need to answer something that my phone notified me..

[jchw]

> It went from nicely working Qt program that worked well on OSX, Linux, and Windows

Nitpick: I believe it was only Qt on Linux. (I know the core of it was once Delphi as well, i believe that was purely not UI though.)

[sprafa]

Skype on windows is a disaster. On iOS my girlfriend and I use it (we have to) and I can never connect to her, no matter how fast my connection is, she has to call me.

[sva_]

Sounds to me like it is perhaps a firewall issue?

Also, I remember that MS used to still offer a "Skype for Desktop" native app on windows, additionally to the electron based app. I haven't used Windows/Skype for some time now though, so I'm not sure.

[Yizahi]

No, it started after upgrade to 8.x versions. I've tried to keep 7.x working for as long as could and after MS force banned that branch and I upgraded to electron version (which supposedly was tested for more than a year already) it started to freeze, drop call, delay messages and so on. And multiple people in the office reported this so we started migrating from this thing. And web version doesn't work in Firefox.

[Spidery]

Skype is a disaster...

[pas]

PSA - use web.skype.com if you must (for Firefox use this addon https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/addon/skype-web-ff/ - I have no idea whether voice/video works on FF, but then if you really must you can open Chrome/Edge)

[richardwhiuk]

Agree - the title of this article needs changing - maybe dang or one of the mods can do that.

[ekianjo]

Where did you see it stopped working on Linux? What kind of misinformation is that?

More relevant is that it went from a p2p network structure to full centralized under Microsoft.

[fnord123]

The Qt version worked. Then they released a terrible Electron version around 2016. You couldn't make video calls in the Linux version. This constitutes not working. I stopped using it.

I just installed the snap now and it seems a lot better and it seems to support video calls on Linux (didn't try to call anyone since everyone I know left skype). Too little too late.

Looks like they stole the remaining credit out of my account though.

[ekianjo]

> Then they released a terrible Electron version around 2016.

That was in 2016. That situation did not last something like 3 years. Indeed there was a time where the electron client was dysfunctional but that did not last more than half a year.

[azangru]

> and I think it stopped working on Linux altogethe

Linux client works great! Probably precisely because it's now an electron app.