It's worth mentioning that the Skype for Linux Alpha FAQ[0] mentions that this build is (finally) 64-bit and 32-bit support may not come.

I for one welcome this. The last time I installed Skype on Arch Linux it installed 200MB+ of lib32 dependencies[1]. I'm sure this will be replaced with 100MB of web browser stuff, but perhaps a step forward and simplifies the lives of package maintainers.

[0] https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA34656/more-information-ab... see "How has Skype for Linux Alpha been tested?"

[1] https://twitter.com/2bluesc/status/738073923120594945

So, one more js-based app.

After Atom/Slack it became obvious there will be plenty of them (Webkit The RAM Eater) for every purpose.

I'd like to hear any technical details available. Is it "offline" package like Atom? or "simple webview over web.skype.com" as mentioned before? etc

Atom is seriously way too slow for me. I've gone back to VIM.

Try Visual Studio Code - written on javascript as well but way faster. Can't beat vim ofc

Yeah, I dropped Atom because even a heavily plugin-loaded IntelliJ was outperforming it, but vs code is not that much slower than vim on my devices.

I really hate this trend of packaging every web app into its own WebKit instance.

About freaking time. One less headache for us Linux users. I am loving this new Microsoft that recognizes that not everyone uses Windows.

Not that exciting after running this for over a year:

  chromium --app=http://web.skype.com

It's basically a closed-source Ghetto Skype[0]. Thanks, Microsoft!

[0]: https://github.com/stanfieldr/ghetto-skype

No screesharing though - seems like simple webview over web.skype.com

Hmm, the web-based skype didn't work for me only 2 weeks ago and I got a "this does not work on Linux" error.

Let's see if this works, when I need skype again...