Skype 4.0 for Linux

234 points by Intermediate 14 years ago | 112 comments

SnowLprd 14 years ago |

Ooh! Ooh! Does it have the new Conversation Ads feature?

http://blogs.skype.com/en/2012/06/skype_advertising_update.h...

I, for one, cannot WAIT to see these new ads, which Microsoft describes as "content that could spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users."

Isn't that great? Ads are now "content." And the motivation isn't to make a bundle of money on ads, it's to "spark conversations."

Add this to the craptastical user interface and built-in backdoor eavesdropping, and it's plain to see that Skype has a bright future ahead!

http://memeburn.com/2011/07/microsoft-and-skype-set-to-allow...

itsboring 14 years ago | |

I'm inclined to agree with your points, I always preferred the linux client over the windows one, but skype just gets on my nerves recently. My team has switched to mumble for meetings and stuff and we find it immeasurably better. Plus, channels are a much better method for general collaboration than the outdated concept of conference calls.

etherealG 14 years ago | | |

what do you use for a mumble server? I would happily choose this if there were an easy to use free version like skype.

ZeroGravitas 14 years ago | | |

And mumble should get even better in a future update when it switches to Opus which combines their current CELT codec with, relevantly, Skype's SILK for better low-bitrate speech encoding.

lwhi 14 years ago | |

Just tried it .. works pretty flawlessly for me, very impressed.

There aren't any adverts so far ..

Jabbles 14 years ago | |

How else could they possibly justify spending $8billion on it?

brudgers 14 years ago | | |

Skype has been a disruptive technology within the phone industry. Combined with Microsoft's mobile operating system and perhaps a hardware partner such as Nokia, it is quite possible that we may say mobile "phones" that completely bypass the current established carriers.

To put it another way, how often are most people away from a WiFi network when they make a call? Or more importantly, when they access a data stream with their device? $8 billion for Microsoft is not a significant amount when it comes to purchasing growth, and the article isn't about Facetime for Linux.

bernalkc 14 years ago | |

no ads in this client, on any screen, presumptuous one. next time look before you embarrass yourself.

SnowLprd 14 years ago | | |

To be fair, I wasn't presuming anything. While I applaud the release of the Linux version, I was merely trying to show that Microsoft's stewardship of Skype seems to be headed in a rather unsavory direction.

beedogs 14 years ago | | |

Wow. Do you post dickish replies much? You seem good at it.

Paul_S 14 years ago |

The best thing about how big skype is is that they have to maintain backwards compatibility (hardware skype phones that can't upgrade) so you can use whatever old version you want and it has to be supported by them. Which means you can stick to the old version which works fine without having to suffer through the new and "improved" glitzy version that is popup crazy and wants to hog all your system resources for what is essentially a chat program.

mhurron 14 years ago | |

> they have to maintain backwards compatibility

Well, no they don't. They can drop any legacy client whenever they wish. Microsoft could even try to make it sound like they're doing a good thing by removing unmaintainable legacy stuff they inherited from Skype.

Microsoft is not really required to maintain backwards compatibility with Skypes legacy stuff. It is possible they updated the Linux client for exactly this reason; update what you can, depreciate the rest for the good of everyone else.

fredsted 14 years ago | |

> old version which works fine

And has a bunch of security holes.

Paul_S 14 years ago | | |

Which specific ones do you mean?

slig 14 years ago | |

Well, I suppose they can identify exactly what version (and machine/OS) the client is using and specifically block old PC apps if they wanted to.

baby 14 years ago | |

I can't use Skype because I have an iPhone 3GS which doesn't have the latest iOS (available only on iPhones 4).

So I don't really get your point.

beagle3 14 years ago | | |

Skype worked fine for me in Jan 2012, last time I used my iphone 3G (ios 4.2.1).

Voice/chat only, of course, because of missing front camera.

lparry 14 years ago | | |

Not sure what you're talking about, iOS 5.1 is out for the 3GS and even iOS 6.0 is supposed to be coming out for it. Maybe you only have a 3G?

phenom 14 years ago |

You should probably stay on 2.2 beta....

1. Skype 4 require download 95 additional packages for ubuntu version (all marked i386 even if you using amd64)

2. I am not sure but giant ads probably included too [1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/skype-...

lsaferite 14 years ago |

Did hell freeze over?

I've been waiting for an update to the Linux Skype client for years. Years!

Of course, if I have to install a ton of i386 packages or have big ass ads all over the place I think it's not worth the effort.

Is it too much to ask to give paying customers access to just a lib that can be used in other GUIs? :(

BitMastro 14 years ago |

I think the future is WebRTC, it's an open standard and the browser is one of the most ubiquitous software you'll ever run. I don't use Skype much, but I have friends using Skype, MSN, Facebook, gchat (I still haven't used hangouts). All these services requires registration and sometimes a specific software to communicate. I wish that by the end of the year it won't matter what service you're using, you'll just send a message like "Hey let's talk, click on this link"

Bjoern 14 years ago |

Curious question, is there any good open source application out there supporting voice and video? Possibly, multiple people as in G+ Hangout?

sciurus 14 years ago | |

On linux Empathy, Gajim, Jitsi, and Pidgin all support audio and video chat. I believe they're all interoperable with each other and with the video chat in gmail.

I think that Jitsi (formerly named SIP Communicator) supports audio and video chat on Windows and OS X as well. I don't think that any of these projects support video conference calls yet, but it's on the "near future" section of Jitsi's roadmap.

https://jitsi.org/

Bjoern 14 years ago | | |

Great stuff, thanks for the tips.

Shish2k 14 years ago |

Clicking from the linked article to get to the download page, the download is still for 2.2 :-/ Anyone got a direct link to the 4.0 page?

ED: The English version is 2.2, the American version is 4.0...

For non-americans, use the american link: http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/get-skype/on-your-computer/l...

pbhjpbhj 14 years ago | |

Worked fine for me, file dl-ed from http://download.skype.com/linux/skype-ubuntu_4.0.0.7-1_amd64...

Edit had to install 6 deps using gdebi; when I ran the app it crashed before authentication completed and took down my desktop session on Kubuntu 12.04.

scribu 14 years ago |

At some point, Skype announced that it would open-source the UI part of the Linux client, allowing people to implement whatever interface they wanted.

I guess that was before they were bought by Microsoft.

decklin 14 years ago | |

You can communicate with the Skype client over DBus, which allows you to replace a lot (although not all) of the UI with something else. Two examples:

http://code.google.com/p/skype4pidgin/ https://github.com/technomancy/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/skyy...

The protocol is incomplete (the "native" Qt UI isn't built on it), but it is at least documented on their dev site.

scribu 14 years ago | | |

There's also https://launchpad.net/~skype-wrapper/+archive/ppa but it's buggy and still requires you have the main Skype window running.

o1iver 14 years ago |

Arch Linux AUR packages available at: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=60059

I have tested it; works great!

mcrittenden 14 years ago | |

The community Skype package has been updated to Skype 4 now, so no need for the AUR. http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/skype/

perssontm 14 years ago |

It still says try skype 2.2 beta on the page, but when I download it, I get a file called skype-debian_4.0.deb :)

benatkin 14 years ago |

I'd rather run Skype inside its own virtual machine, with ads blocked by restricting network access. Since a full Linux distribution can be obtained for free, this could help enable that.

theatrus2 14 years ago | |

Since Skype is one of the slipperiest applications out there in terms of network access, I'd imagine ads could be served by any node in the network.

vegardx 14 years ago |

I find it sad that Skype has evolved to be MSN Messenger-replacement, there were so many good alternatives. At one point MSN was even usable-ish, as you could choose whatever client you wanted. With Skype, not so much.

I'm switching a lot between OSX and Windows, and sometimes even Linux, and the clients are totally different on each platform to the point where it get's hard to use. And don't get me started on that Android-client they have made, total utter garbadge.

fepa 14 years ago | |

>> the clients are totally different on each platform to the point where it get's hard to use.

I've been annoyed by this too, how hard is it to keep the UI somewhat alike, at least between the desktop applications?

keporahg 14 years ago |

Anyone know if the version in the Debian Skype repo (http://wiki.debian.org/skype) will be updated?

donniezazen 14 years ago | |

It has been already updated in Arch Repos. I see no reason Why Debian would block it.

keporahg 14 years ago | | |

I meant if anyone knew whether Skype had any plans of updating the repo since it's owned by them (http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/), or whether they intended for people to just use the provided packages.

sciurus 14 years ago |

They used to have a statically-linked version available for download; where did that go? It's the only one that didn't crash on my Debian testing system.

baldfat 14 years ago |

Just happy that M$ is showing more love of Linux. I never thought a new version would ever get out!

smoyer 14 years ago |

Do you think they heard my comment yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4107759)? Thanks for finally deciding to provide me with new Linux software. I'm also super excited about seeing more meaningless ads ... but where were you when I needed you?

I'm actually a bit surprised that you're even trying this since it seems to be a well-proven fact that Microsoft can't make money on search or ads. And if you needed additional revenue, did you ever consider asking people to pay you for your service?

As an interesting aside, Skype's move to using super-nodes that are controlled by them is also useful for the change to an advertisement supported business. Can you imagine how hard it would be to share ad revenue with regular users whose computers had been promoted to super-nodes simply because of bandwidth capacity and their up-time numbers?

olenhad 14 years ago |

Just opensource the damn thing. It would profit them far more than anyone else.

mkenyon 14 years ago | |

I'm curious to see your numbers on that.

olenhad 14 years ago | | |

opensource-> fewer bugs -> more users -> more satisfied users -> firefox style extensions or even an "app store" -> code improvements -> support for more platforms -> praise of the world's hacker community

throwaway64 14 years ago | | |

If you want to call somebody's claim out as bullshit, call it out as bullshit, please stop with the passive aggressive [citation needed] shit, it is extremely obnoxious, does not contribute to the discourse, and becoming very common in the comments here.

I encourage other users to down vote these style of comments, and up vote explicit reasoned replies.

factorialboy 14 years ago |

Not bad. Not close to Skype for Windows, but that's not a bad thing. Plus no ads.

I'm primarily an Ubuntu user (Unity or XFCE) and use a secondary Windows 7 laptop with Skype as a communication device.

technomancy 14 years ago |

I've moved as much as I can over to Jingle via Empathy, but so far when I haven't been able to avoid Skype I've found the Android client much preferable to the old Linux one.

barbs 14 years ago |

Can't wait to try this! But I'm on my mac at work atm. I'm worried they've bloated the interface and made it horrible like they did with Skype 5 for mac...has this happened?

balac 14 years ago | |

so far it seems ok to me, it hasn't got the super huge interface like on mac & windows, apart from the call window it largely looks the same.

whacker 14 years ago |

The rpm package has a bug: It has a bunch of translation files that conflict with the older skype version.

So remove the old version of skype first before installing the new one.

zfran 14 years ago |

Can't run two instances at the same time. Complete deal breaker for those of us that use a personal account and a professional one.

jrockway 14 years ago | |

Create two user accounts and run one instance in each? This is Linux...

jkbyc 14 years ago | | |

true. And in case you see "No protocol specified" when running skype from user account xyz, try running "xhost + SI:localuser:xyz" first

lsr0 14 years ago | |

skype --dbpath=~/.otherskype

ArchD 14 years ago |

Ubuntu 12 and Fedora 17 are the latest versions of Ubuntu and Fedora but apparently not supported according to the download distribution list. (s/11/12/, basic idea remains -- only old distros are listed)

ArchD 14 years ago | |

It would be more accurate to say seemingly instead of apparently. The nuance is that the description in the download list implies that only the old distros are supported, but actually at least on F17, the F16 package still works. Why on earth they would release a 32-bit package but not a 64-bit package in this day and age, however, is a mystery.

reidrac 14 years ago | |

Have you tried the actual packages?

The download page is confusing. I believe it should read "Fedora X or later". Previous package was for Fedora 10 I think, and I've been using it since Fedora 12.

EDIT: typo

SafeSituation 14 years ago | |

Unless I'm mistaken, the latest version of Ubuntu is 12.04

drizzt 14 years ago |

It works like a charm!

leke 14 years ago |

It's a trap.

Toshio 14 years ago |

Obtrusive conversation ads coming to a Skype-for-Linux near you in 3... 2... 1...

MidwestMuster 14 years ago |

What kind of codename is "Four Rooms for Improvement?" (what they called this release)

protopete 14 years ago | |

Non-authorative suggestion: 1995 movie "Four rooms" and the phrase "room for improvement"

trentmb 14 years ago | |

I think it's a play on "room for improvement" involving the version number.