I use Skype on Linux. Its a few versions behind, but to be honest last time I looked at it on Windows it was full of unnecessary flashy effects with no real purpose. I don't care about those as the Linux interface is fine for me. The call quality is crap whatever platform is being used.

Skype for Linux' UI is definitely better than the ad-ridden Windows counterpart. BUT it doesn't work. At work we have a lot of group chats, and some of them simply aren't shown in the Linux Desktop client.

And Skype for Web is utter crap (no non-latin search in contacts, WTF?), though it displays all messages.

It is pretty bad that a company with a global product doesn't include global support. In addition to the lack of support for non-latin characters in search, here's another one. I live in a country that uses the Buddhist era calendar. So the year is 2559 not 2016, a difference of 543 years. Skype sent me a notice that one of my contacts had a birthday and had turned 579 (she turned 36).

If anyone wants to use Skype I just use the web client. It works with voice on Chromium now and thats good enough for me while I keep ranting about open protocols and how everyone should be using Vector now.

> Linux support doesn't exist despite claims of embracing it.

huh :) i use skype on linux (archlinux) daily. and having seen my colleagues use it on windows, honestly, i find overall experience on linux infinitely better.

on windows there are tons of flashy things going on which serve to distract more than anything useful. if you happen to use non-corporate version, a huge chunk of chat area is filled with ads ^^)

Yup thats why I use the web client. I have to use it for work, otherwise I would've just used some XMPP client hooked to the public Jabber network.

Yup. I bet this office closure was just to consolidate the offices as they go to minimal offshore support somewhere to hold it in maintenance mode.

They've done nothing but make it worse since they bought it.

It doesn't sound like you're even remotely informed of what's going on in the Skype world lately. Basically, the old infrastructure was peer-to-peer, and over the last couple of months, Microsoft has been moving Skype over to a cloud version. That's why you'll notice the announcements that a lot of older clients and platforms would stop working, and brand new apps have been made for all of the current platforms... including a brand new Linux client.

If anything, this year is the biggest change Skype has EVER HAD.

Sounds like I should take a look at the latest client, I stopped using Skype years ago because the Linux client sucked so much.

No guarantees it won't still suck. (Though it's completely new, I think it's Electron-based or something.) Just saying, there IS a huge momentum at Microsoft to rework Skype from the ground up.

Skype was moved to a client-server architecture (with the old p2p supernodes being run only by MS) soon after they bought it, not recently.

Not really. A supernode isn't really client/server architecture, even if it's hosted by Microsoft. Communication between users is still peer-to-peer. Supernodes are basically meant to help you find the client of who you're talking to. (Like the master server in many FPS games, it's just helping you find other players, one of the players or a dedicated server someone is running is actually hosting.) You could see this behavior recently even, in that if you sent a chat or a file, it could not go through unless both your client and their client were simultaneously online.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...

Now, all of your actual communications are being stored in Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. This means the actual content is centralized, and can be delivered when the other client is not present, which will help a lot with mobile. It also means it's more able to be reached by government data requests, of course.