Skype support status

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Hello everyone,

It's not a secret that Skype was bought by Microsoft a few months back and that
there's a great chance that its native Linux version will get even fewer updates in the
future because I doubt that Microsoft is even remotely endorse the existence of Linux
and open source, thus Skype may easily become a "burden" they don't want to bear.

Another quite important fact to consider is that the Linux version of Skype has fewer
features than its Windows counterpart and that there are multiple issues regarding
Skype, like the absence of a native 64bit version and a number of quite serious bugs
(crashes, exclusive sound card access preventing other applications from working,
100% CPU usage after hibernation/sleep).

Currently under Wine 1.4-rc2 I wasn't able to even run any version of Skype even in
a simple chat mode. Very old versions of Skype cannot get online, more recent ones
crash when trying to get online, or crash when you just start them, the last few
releases (5.5-5.8) use MSHTML as their logon form and the way it behaves under Wine
you cannot make use of it.

I know that Codeweavers resources are very limited and that your priorities and the
priority of  other programmers hacking Wine are mostly concerned about getting proper
support for core Windows applications like MS Office, Adobe products and other crucial
programs, but I think it would be wise to make even basic Skype functionality work,
because there are operating systems other than Windows, MacOS (iOS), and Linux
(Android) and many people are left without one of the most popular messengers in
the world.

In short this message is a cry for getting Skype to work _at all_, because now it's
totally unusable.

With respect,

Artem S. Tashkinov