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Comment by SunShiranui | Hacker News Reader

Skype has been getting worse and worse over the years. Personally I've switched to Telegram for chats, and I'll be looking for alternatives as far as voice calls are concerned.

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I use tox[1] with my family and some friends.

https://tox.chat/

Does that have a native app for the desktop? I'm tired of everything using Electron and requiring hundreds of megabytes of RAM for simple stuff :-(

It is written in C and has several desktop clients.

https://tox.chat/clients.html

and much more details https://wiki.tox.chat/clients#features

I have to investgate further. Is libvpx used?

Yes, qTox and uTox use libvpx.

Tox sucks for audio. At least when i tried it 3 months ago.

I was thinking on this topic. You know what's the problem with alternatives? Nobody uses them. I'm seriously pissed off by this.

I recently saw how all my friends moved to Telegram, and this is nice. But for instance my company has daily skype calls, and I have to get skype for those.

I eventually decided to give it up on my (Linux) laptop and get the calls only on Android, where it still sucks, but at least it works.

> I recently saw how all my friends moved to Telegram, and this is nice.

All my friends are on Whatsapp, and this is not nice... I'm going to try to convert them to Telegram., not easy.

I don't understand why people on HN are still recommending Telegram. It's not open, the crypto is highly questionable, and messages are not encrypted end-to-end by default (and not at all in groups). Use one of the apps that gets a full score in the EFF's Secure Messaging Scorecard [1], like Signal.

[1] https://www.eff.org/secure-messaging-scorecard

> still recommending Telegram

I'm not. I'm just saying that the majority of my friends are using it. For me it's better than skype and whatsapp. The GNU/Linux client works fine (although I'm not a big fan of its codebase: I had a look at it and guess what…)

> like Signal

Or ...Telegram (search in that page for "Telegram (secret chats)")

It's true that not all of my criteria are included in the scorecard. For one thing, it's based on the statements of the developers, so if they say "it's encrypted", the EFF takes them at their word, and doesn't investigate the quality of the crypto. It also doesn't consider usability issues (secure defaults).

If you've got a better suggestion for secure group chats on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, OS X, and Windows, please let me know! My family uses telegram extensively, but I'd love to replace it with something better if there's anything with similarly good UX on all of the platforms we use.

Did you try https://whispersystems.org/ ? There is a desktop version but it doesn't support voice: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-desktop/

Hmm. The parent says he needs voice though, no?

'Desktop version':

- it is a Chrome App (arguably not a desktop client?)

- it in (restricted) beta, aka not available

- the beta requires (acc. to the link you provided) "your Google account email"

> Hmm. The parent says he needs voice though, no?

You can make voice calls with Signal, to other Signal users.

Yes. On a mobile. We might have a different interpretations of the GP's requirements.

Given that they replaced Lync/Skype for Business™ I assume they ideally want a comparable offering: Voice and chat for a number of platforms.

Signal would give you voice on mobiles only and chat on mobiles only, ignoring the Chrome App beta thing.

I might be entirely wrong, but I assumed that the GP chose Telegram for now due to the multi-platform support (chat on all platforms, replacing Lync/Skype in that regard completely). If that is correct, moving to Signal would be a trade-off, exchanging multi-platform support for voice calls. It's not a solution, it's a different subset of Lync's/Skype's feature set

These three issues are kind of connected. They're requesting you your Google account email so they can associate your account with their private beta (available in the Chrome store) and let you install it from the Chrome's webstore.

You can go the other way around and "build" it. Just clone their repo and point Chrome to the cloned directory so that it knows that there's an unsigned extension there. Done.

I use it on mobile for texts, but I need a desktop client that allows group voice chats.

There is a huge problem with Signal.

Once on of your contact uninstall Signal without disabling it first, you will have to long press the send button EACH time you want to text them. Annoying as hell, it made me stop using Signal.

For gaming I use https://discordapp.com/

It's a shame discord brands itself so thoroughly as a gaming communication solution. I've had friends (not business contacts!) decline to switch to it because it's not a general chat program but a chat program for gamers.

That's a bit silly. We've got a lot of people who use Discord for non-gaming stuff. I wonder what specifically about "for gamers" turns them off.

Linphone (VoIP) works beautifully, is free software and is cross-platform (also works on android). It's also lightweight and personally I find the quality of calls to be superior to Skype.

The last time I used this tool (two years ago, I think), it was quite problematic to have it running. I was not able to find a suitable tutorial for it. Was this problem fixed nowadays?

Really? I used it for the past four years with no problems whatsoever. I used it since I linked a VoIP number to a landline in order to be called for free from my parents with no tech hassle.

What kind of problems did you have? Usually its just a matter of installing it, (optionally) make an account on the Linphone site and get it running.

As a GNU/Linux user, I join the choir of frustration. I'm not adding my own experience, since it's the same for everyone.

My two cents about alternatives: appear.in Not so good with connection establishment, but works fine most of the cases.

Same here, WeChat and Telegram provides everything that I need, I do not mind having two tools for slightly different use cases.

Our project added calls in latest release: actor.im, works much better than skype

Hangouts is a decent alternative although for some reason it is not always reliable either.

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