Microsoft confirms the death of Skype.....migrating users to Teams 'Free' version

[mikewalsh]

Evening, gang.

As the title says; Microsoft has now confirmed (as of 3 days ago) that Skype - after 21 years - is set to meet its demise on May 20th this year:-

https://www.howtogeek.com/skype-potenti ... down-2025/

Rumours had been circulating for a while that the Redmond tech giant's premium video-calling/VOIP telephony app was being wound down. Business users have long since migrated to either Teams, or to other platforms, and Microsoft is directing existing members of its shrinking, though still loyal fan base to move to the free version of Teams. This is the officially "designated successor".

The VOIP telephony functionality is being dropped; Teams is essentially a collaborative chat & video-calling platform in its subscription form. Its 'free' variant is just chat & video-calls for the individual, non-business user. I'm no fan of Microsoft OR Windows, but I've been using the web version of Teams as a standalone desktop 'client' by the simple expedient of using Chrome's long-standing ability to 'run a website in its own window'. The web variant of Teams is identical to the desktop app in any case, since both use the Electron platform to guarantee cross-platform/multi-arch operation.

If you use ANY of the Chromium-based clones, you can bookmark the Teams website, then set it to run as a 'client' in its own, detached window. This ability is baked-in to the browser's codebase.....and it works extremely well. The quality of your video-calls is dictated entirely by how good your camera is; my Logitech c920 makes as good a showing under Linux as it does under Windows. In this respect, you cannot tell the difference. Pairing it with the Logitech H340 headset, audio reproduction is every bit as good, too.

The infrastructure has improved exponentially in recent years.......and it shows. So.......RIP Skype??

Mike.

[AQUAR]

Its unfortunate for Skype users on Windows 7 as teams won't execute this unsupported OS (still the best OS from $MS IMHO).

Is it doable to create a portable "teams-for-linux" from the snap (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux)?

[peebee]

Has anybody got Teams working on Puppy Linux?

I've tried both the web version (in Chromium) and the Snap Electron version (teams-for-linux) and both do not show any working audio devices..........

Thanks

Screenshot.png (77.3 KiB) Viewed 127 times

[mikewalsh]

@peebee :-

Hi, Peter.

I have this running quite happily in assorted Pups.....both as a webapp in Chrome-portable, AND as a webapp under the Chromium-portable I'm maintaining using AlienBob's packages for Slackware 15/'current'.

Here's the proof of the pudding:-

As a webapp in Chromium-portable:-

.....and as a webapp in Chrome-portable:-

Both recorded with Fred's recently-released Take A Cast!.....ffmpeg-based, .mkv container, good quality and very small file-size. Good stuff.

===================================

There IS one peculiarity when running from within the browser. You'll find that on the first run, no audio devices show; probably because you have to "Allow" video and comms before it'll launch fully. Second and subsequent runs, everything you select then shows.....but I believe that's pretty much as expected, TBH.

For the webapp, I access Teams from the M$ Office365 website; I've had an M$ a/c for a VERY long time. Having brought it up, I then use the browser tools to create a webapp, followed by the trick I demo'd on the old forum, several years ago:-

http://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=112072

Now you go into the browser 'Apps' page and create a shortcut to 'Desktop'.....which sends it to either /root/Desktop OR /home/spot/Desktop (you may have to create the latter; I don't believe it exists by default). You can then extract the 'AppID' from the desktop entry the browser creates, and use it to build a script & .desktop entry that will work in Puppy. It's all pretty simple; I've got the process automated by now for my own use, since I use a ton of 'webapps'.

The Electron-based 'app' is just a huge PITA. It's too 'fussy' by far, and wants all sorts of authentication dependencies installing before it'll condescend to behave itself. Far simpler just running it direct from the browser, it really is.

Hope that helps!

Mike.