We've been using Skype for internal communication for a very long time. Back then it was the only option that worked on all the OSes we need (Linux, Windows, Mac), had all the features, and it just worked.

But the Electron app is just damn terrible. The message layout is super inefficient - it can display maybe half the messages compared to the native client. If you click somewhere, it un-expectecly moves you somewhere else. And it just stopped delivering new messages some time ago (I've tried to downgrade to 5.2, but that made no difference).

Interestingly enough, the web skype delivers messages just fine (it still sucks for all the other reasons).

And it also does not drain the battery that much. The devs apparently had the bright idea to render the messages window as canvas, and refresh it at 60hz no matter what. Because of emoticons. The web skype does that too, but if the tab is inactive Firefox suspends that.

The only thing that mostly works for me is the Android client. I wonder how they'll break that one.

In any case, we have lost all hope Skype will get better again. Also, there are other options nowadays.

I've worked in one office that had Skype (for business) properly integrated, and it was very nice. But, like so many other things, they couldn't just fix bugs, and make sure to keep it working on new OS versions.

I am not affiliated, I just like it.

I do like mumble and ran my own server for years, but client wise it is not as easy.

These should be added soon™, though.

What we need for the internal communication (within the company) is a simple IM, integrated with ticketing system (a bunch of generic rooms, per-ticket rooms, linking from tickets, ...). We're pretty much set on using Mattermost for that, which has the advantage of being self-hosted.

For voice (typically group calls with other engineers) we'll probably stick with Skype for now (I the Android app on my phone for that). For meetings with customers we usually use a regular service with dial-in anyway.

We don't do video, and I don't think I've needed screen sharing in the last few years.

For video though your options are definitely more limited, keep an eye on Riot, I'm not sure that it's ready yet, but when it is it will present an extremely good option. If you only need mobile, Signal does it today and is probably one of the most stable and secure products around, can't vouch for the video quality though personally.

Google Hangouts.

But I guess we don't really need the video calls that much (After all, who'd want to see video of engineers working mostly from home, right?) and the ability to self-host and integrate Mattermost with the issue tracker etc. is quite neat.

Web-based, supports notification, Slack integration, custom urls.

For one, it tends to split group convos into random tabs at random intervals, black hole messages, crash randomly and silently and you don't notice until someone says you're offline(the window will still open! it's just hung), etc etc.

That's a kind of a showstopper so I switched back to 4.3 hoping they'll fix it before the end of the month. I have a Windows VM with Skype installed but I'd rather start using something else with my customers.

Another annoying feature of the new Skype is that it has that modern/videogame look and feel which could be appropriate for casual chatting but not for business. Version 4.3 can be tweaked to look much like these HN pages: text with little space in between. Much more appropriate when copy pasting information and when scrolling back to read past calls.

And no history past 30 days.

And no search in history anyway.

And that useless unresizable black call window that eats up of half of the screen, thanks MS!

That maybe true, but I assure you that program will not scale to millions of messages. The reason so many companies "get it wrong" isnt because their developers are less skilled than graduates. Syncing M:N state at scale is hard.

Seriously, I love some of the things MS makes, but Skype has become one of those products that seems to survive on inertia instead of quality. Fortunately Google is also firmly intent on self-destructing on the subject of Chat as well, so it's crap all around.

Did the entire software industry get together and have a conference where they all agreed to screw up text messaging?

The regular Skype client is completely unusable to me on Windows 7. It works ok on MacOS.

This works well for me since most of my skype traffic is chats, but I have to load the new skype app for calls.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_condition

Do people actually do that? Where did that come from?

Maybe because it makes your machine's fans sound like a race car?

Honestly this is the first I've heard of this usage as well.

Random behavior is usually an indication that there may very likely be a race condition without needing the source code.

Turns out eventual consistency doesn't work well with chat apps.

Linux is not really a thing. It's a mess of numerous operating systems. Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, redhat, slackware, all themselves available in different incompatible editions.

I pity developers who have to support desktop applications on linux.

- An old enough glibc (glibc is backward compatible)

- static link as much as you can (I know this is against the unix way, but the only way to workaround most of the compatiblity issues). This is pretty much what macOS apps do by shipping .framework within .app.

Beside this, QT and GTK will pretty much always be available.

I just want to send and receive messages to my existing contacts.

Seems like we are headed to a dark age of software.

This is most likely due to one computer's time being out of sync then re-syncing