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Comment by therealmarv | Hacker News Reader

I really do not like conference systems which do not work on Linux. Not everybody is using a Mac or Windows. Microsoft is also ignoring Skype and Skype for Business on Linux. This is all crap.

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We are mostly Mac and Linux at my company.. give Zoom a shot, it's worked out well for video, audio, and sharing... (Europeans in this post have had latency issues though)

I can vouch for this, used it daily for most of last year.. And we didn't have much of any latency issues with our team in Canada and 2 others in Turkey.

same here, people from all over the globe, 30+ people on a meeting, everything just works®.

and the linux client works really well (it's on aur, if you use archlinux)

We (resin.io) are a totally remote company, with 50 people across 25 cities on 5 continents, and we use Zoom for pretty much everything every day, it's amazing.

I've never seen any latency problems personally - we even do a call with everybody in the company in one room every week, mostly on video, and it doesn't even blink. Drastically better than anything else I've ever tried.

For our needs, https://talky.io does the trick. It "just works" for our Linux machines (along with Mac and Windows). Never tried to use it on mobile (however apparently there's an iPhone app for it). It's peer-to-peer low-latency video chatting via WebRTC, the video quality is far better for us than our previous attempts with Google Hangouts.

Also, it's free.

Don't know about Skype for business but they are rewriting the normal Skype client for Linux.

https://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/bd-p/Linux

I didn't try it out. The old client still works. The only missing feature is screen sharing in multiple parties video calls. I'm using TeamViewer for that. Desktop sharing is much smoother with TeamViewer anyway.

The real plus of Skype over Hangout or Webex is the chat: the history is stored forever locally and I can search every message I sent. We're using a Skype group chat even when we're using TeamViewer.

Old client will be turned off in a month or so.

That would be a big problem. Any link to that announcement?

Edit: never mind, I googled it https://community.skype.com/t5/Linux/Skype-for-Linux-End-of-...

(I should have googled first, asked second)

It's a problem because it seems that the new client is far from being fully functional.

Another update: The Linux client v4.3 seems to be safe. In a post on page 2 of that thread the community manager states

> At this time we are not retiring any of the existing working Linux Clients.

What they are retiring are old Windows and Mac clients

> beginning March 1, users running older versions of Skype for Windows desktop (7.16 and below) or Skype for Mac (7.0 to 7.18) will no longer be able to sign in.

Phew!

> That would be a big problem. Any link to that announcement?

No problem. I am using the new Alpha Client since three months and it is very stable and usable. The only major missing feature are video conference calls with more but one opposite, but that is actively being worked on. Looks like MS is heading for feature parity with the Windows client.

Skype for Business only shares a logo and the name, everything else is Lync-as-usual: Windows-only, and sometimes not even Windows.

macOS also has Skype for Business

It looks like they support a web client for use on Linux for viewing meetings, at least.

https://answers.chime.aws/articles/17/supported-operating-sy...

At my current gig, it's WebEx. The Linux client supposedly does work on 32-bit FireFox using 32-bit Java. I've tried some docker containers that supposedly support this configuration, but so far I can't get anything to work.

WebEx is literally the only reason I even start up a Windows VM at work.

When I worked in a WebEx shop, I gave up on the Linux/Firefox situation and just used their Android client on a tablet or phone.

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