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Microsoft Is Disabling Older Versions of Skype For Mac and Windows On March 1 (venturebeat.com)
If you're using an older, outdated version of Skype, you may want to consider updating soon. Microsoft said today that starting on March 1 people will no longer be able to sign in to version 7.16 of Skype for Window desktop and older versions, and version 7.18 of Skype for Mac and older versions thereof. VentureBeat reports: "If you're one of those users, all you'll need to do is download the new update," the Skype team said in a blog post. This isn't the first time Skype is retiring old software. But that doesn't mean the upcoming move won't rankle some people. Version 7.18 of Skype for Mac and version 7.16 of Skype for Windows both came out less than a year and a half ago -- in December 2015. So it's not as if this is very old software. Still, Microsoft has been doing a lot to improve Skype in the past year. It's been migrating the app to its Azure public cloud infrastructure, and adding chatbots. Current versions of Skype -- like version 7.44 for Mac -- come with amenities like better previews of websites and better support for emoticons and other content in the input box for chats. "We've poured our energy and passion into creating something truly special, and this is just the beginning," Skype said.
Subject: Microsoft disables p2p Skype protocol starting March 1, 2017
In a recent update of Skype for Windows Microsoft has announced that starting March 1, 2017 older, p2p versions of Skype will cease to work. This affects Skype for Windows versions 7.16 and below, Skype for Mac version 7.0 to 7.18 and the native Linux client (its only functional version 4.3). This news is especially unpleasant for Linux users of Skype, since the new "cloud ready" version of Skype for Linux is nothing more than a packaged Google Chromium web browser with Node.js running a web version of Skype, which means its memory consumption is huge and it's unable to store your conversation history locally indefinitely like the native client did.
P.S. One can only wonder why ./ editors choose less informative posts over more informative ones.
Technically, Skype for Linux Alpha is 64-bit. But as Artem Tashkinov pointed out above, it's really just Skype for Web running in 64-bit Chromium, and it takes a half GB of my laptop's 2 GB RAM. Because of the RAM use and the fact that I already had the 32-bit libraries installed to run Wine, I switched back to good old 4.3, which is still the only 32-bit Skype for Linux. Or should I just run the distribution's build of Firefox?
Discord is a disaster. It's a hipster version of IRC. The current nodejs/javascript takeover of desktop applications is becoming a serious problem. These 'native' clients don't integrate with the host system's UI, take gobs of ram for what they do, and are ugly as sin. In discord's case, the UI stack is gpu accelerated, which causes performance problems on marginal gpus (remember, this is just meant to be a chat program). Now I've got three different applications imposing custom skins (hw monitor, steam, discord) but each is shaded slightly differently. It's a mess. Devs are welcome to offer custom skinning as an option, but the default should be to obey system UI conventions. It's not that hard. These 'discoverable' UIs are anything but discoverable, and the insufferable 'google' style corporatespeak used for prompts is galling (eg: "ensuring dankest memes"). These hipster nodejs faggots are trying too hard to be cool.
For all the claimed wonders of 'cloud' offload, the desktop sure still burns a lot of cycles just to display some text on the screen.