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Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by morganvachon on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @06:11PM (#16540855)
Indeed, the Windows app is horrid. One of our older workstations is a quad core i5 with 8GB, nothing special but no slouch either, and the Slack app completely chokes that machine. The employee has to run Slack on her iPhone to be able to get regular work done throughout the day. On our newer workstations it's not quite as bad but it's still noticeable. Our oldest in-service machine is a Core i7 laptop I use when I'm out in the warehouse; that one also chokes heavily with Slack.

It's still 100% an improvement over what we used for chat before (Skype), but I'd be much happier running IRC or XMPP hosted on one of our servers. The boss decided on Slack instead as it's less maintenance on my part. I don't mind the extra work involved with running something we control, but the company wants me on other projects.

Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by tannhaeuser on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @07:27PM (#16541258)
Out of interest, what's your concern with Skype? After a hiatus of ten years, I'm using it currently for a customer, and, maybe apart from cheesy emoticons and space inefficiency, so far it has worked well. Am I the only one to like a native (Linux) desktop client with notification integration etc. more than a bloated web/Electron app?
Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by lokedhs on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @08:17PM (#16541487)
I'm not the original poster, but assuming you're referring to Skype for Business, the main problem with it is that they don't have a Linux client.

The only solution on Linux that implements audio, video and screen sharing is Sky (http://tel.red/), and it's incredibly flaky.

Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by shaklee3 on Thursday March 08, 2018 @12:28AM (#16542507)
Skype for business on Windows is very bad as well. Lots of scaling issues, incorrect status, freezing, etc.
Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by megaman22 on Thursday March 08, 2018 @12:48AM (#16542589)
As often as not, that's a result of shit infrastructure behind the Skype for Business deployment itself, rather than the client itself. There are a number of baffling restrictions baked into the server and protocol itself, and a real production-grade deployment is a byzantine mess that would give Cthulu nightmares.

It doesn't help that the client hasn't had much more than cosmetic changes in at least five years, and is largely abandoned for Microsoft's kludgey Slack competitor.

Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by pjmlp on Thursday March 08, 2018 @02:45AM (#16542971)
I use it daily and we never had issues with it.

When something bad happens, usually it is network infrastructure related or some IT experiment going on.

Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by a_bonobo on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @10:14PM (#16542017)
Not only is Sky shaky, but it's advertised as 'free as in beer', if you want to talk for more than 2 minutes you have to pay. Everybody wants to talk for more than 2 minutes.
Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by morganvachon on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @07:45PM (#16541327)
Mainly, reliability was an issue. There were times when the app would show a user logged in when they weren't, or logged out when they were, making it difficult to decide whether to send a message at that moment.

Sometimes when trying to log in it would say that the (saved) password was incorrect, the user would go change it in their Microsoft account and it still wouldn't take it, then a few hours later it was working fine again.

Slack also has much better search, and their support for attachments is dead-simple. Sending a file on Skype was always a chore that felt like it was 1999 all over again, but on Slack it's literally drag, drop, and collaborate.

As I said before, Slack wasn't my first choice but it's a good platform for what it is. I don't like that our conversations and files are stored on their servers, but I doubt anyone at the company is sifting through our stuff looking for dirt or valuable info on a small business with 10 employees.

Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by dingo_bat on Wednesday March 07, 2018 @07:51PM (#16541362)
If you had tried Skype on windows you'd know.
Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by yorwba on Thursday March 08, 2018 @12:37AM (#16542546)
The current iteration of Skype for Linux is a bloated web/Electron app. I really liked the bare-bones interface of the previous version and would have loved to opt out of animated emoji and the other UI changes, but not updating a program that's continuously connected to the internet didn't feel like a good idea.
Re:Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways by Kliment on Thursday March 08, 2018 @04:09AM (#16543260)
ghetto-skype is a less bloated version of same, works well, uses way less resources

https://github.com/stanfieldr/ghetto-skype