 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about the best alternatives for Skype on Linux. Now there aren't a lot of alternatives. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, some of them are not really Skype alternatives, but are meant for something else, but you could use them for Skype purposes, you know, in a pinch. Today I'm going to cover five, maybe six of them. I'm calling them the best, but there are other alternatives out there that I'll probably try to list in the description below. But these are just the ones that I've found that are fairly useful and fairly competitive to Skype. Now, first let's talk about why you wouldn't want to use Skype. I'm not going to talk about open source in this at all because some of the ones that I'm going to give you aren't actually open source. They may actually all be open source. I'm not sure. That's not how I went through and created this list. More I was just looking at ones that weren't controlled by Microsoft, something that was controlled maybe by a smaller company, something that actually has a native Linux client that's not terrible because the one on the Skype client for Linux is it's handicapped by it being for Linux because it doesn't have a lot of the features that the Windows version has. It's just a thing to say. Let's just go ahead and jump right in. This one here is called QTox. It's kind of like a server paradigm kind of thing. A lot of those are like this. I don't think this is federated, but it's called QTox. It runs on TOX. It's one of those ones where the service is called TOX and then there's a whole bunch of clients. This one here just happens to be called QTox. I'm believing the reason why it's called QTox is because it's written in Qt. I believe that's the reason why it's called QTox. I don't quote me on that. It does pretty much everything you would want Skype to do, but it's not the most intuitive software of the ones that I'll show you. You can go through. You can add contacts. It'll show you all the contacts you have. I don't actually have any contacts on this here. It'll show you previous transfer to files and stuff and then you just have setting. It's not the most intuitive things. It's also not the most feature-rich thing. You can change the user interface and stuff. Like I said, this runs on a service called TOX. There are other clients for this that probably have more features, different interfaces, and so on. That's just one option. It is free. It's also open source. I believe there's also a terminal client. If you want to use TOX from the terminal, you could. Then I think it uses maybe MPV or something to show the video. I'm not sure. I could be just pulling that on my ass. I saw a screenshot of it. That's about as far as my experience with that goes. The audio quality and stuff like this is similar to Skype. The only thing I don't know is whether or not this will actually go through and record anything. I don't think that, like, because Skype has this ability to record the calls you're on. I'm not sure that this has that capability. I'm not seeing if it does. So that's Qtalk. So the next one is called Jami. Now this one here is very pretty. It's a GTK application, but they do have a cute client as well. It's very well put together. It has keyboard shortcuts just like you would have in any GNOME application. All these do require accounts. It doesn't have a ton of options and stuff, but it does have a plug-in mechanism. It allows you to the normal things that you do with audio settings and things like that. Just normal stuff. Again, I'm not sure if it allows for recording or not. It does. It does have call recording. That is really cool. For the Linuxcast, I think Martin and I are going to try this one of these days. Because of the ones that are on this list, this one looks the best to me. I don't know. It feels like some of the other ones don't. Modern Linux, if that's a term. It's not a term, but it just feels the best out of all of them that I've tried. I have not had a chance to test the audio and video quality in this one, but everything I've read said it's really very good. That is jammy. All of these are available either as snaps, flat packs, or in your local repositories. This one here came from the standard Arch repositories. In fact, I believe all the ones that I've actually downloaded were in the standard Arch repositories and not the AUR. The next one is Telegram. I think everyone probably uses Telegram that's on Linux because Telegram is a big thing. An alternative to this one would be Signal, because Signal does the same things. It's only a little bit more encrypted, but Telegram is more popular, so that's the reason why I'm including it on the list. Basically, this is one of those ones where this is meant to be a chat app has video chat features propped onto it. It's not the one I would recommend for you to do anything like recording a podcast, because it doesn't have a lot of the features. Jammy has the recall recording features and all those different audio and visual settings, because it's meant to be a video call thing. It's meant to be a chat platform that has video calling on top of it. It's okay, and it will do in a pinch. It's more like video calling instead of a video recording long session kind of thing like Zoom. That's another one you won't see on this list is Zoom. I don't like Zoom at all. You also won't see Jitsie on this because I don't care for Jitsie. Just from some bad experiences on this. That's Telegram. This one here is not open source. I forgot about that, but at least I don't think Telegram is open source. I don't think so. I use it for messaging. I've only used the video thing a couple of times. It was okay. It's not the best, but not the worst. It's on the list because it's very, very popular. Chances are if you need to call somebody, they probably have a Telegram account and they won't have to set up something like a jammy or a Tox account or something. The next one is this is another one that's not open source. This is Discord. I will freely admit that I never use Discord in the way that I'm suggesting you use it, but I've heard good things. I know a lot of people who record their podcasts on Discord. I know that it's probably unparalleled in terms of the ability to do large chats among a whole bunch of people. It's similar to Slack and Teams, I guess, in that way. It's very much a chat app that has, but unlike Telegram where it's a chat app that has tacked on audio and visual stuff, this actually was built simultaneously with audio and video stuff in mind. I'm not actually sure if it will do video. I know for sure it does audio. That is Discord. The last one I'm going to show you, I have not downloaded and I have not tried, but I know it's an old and true staple amongst Linux users and everything. It's called Mumble. I believe it's a server mechanism where you can actually run it and then you control it off from your own server. I believe it does not do video at all, but I know it will do audio and I know it works very well for people who have very bad internet connections. If you're struggling with bandwidth, this Mumble is the one for you. It's also of the ones that I've showed you, the one that's the most old-fashioned. It's the oldest. It's been around for well over a decade and it's not particularly complicated. It's not, it kind of reminds me of IRC quite a bit for when you set things up. Even like the, these things here are your, you got to connect to a server, which is kind of like IRC and it has rooms and stuff I believe. Anyways, that is Mumble and that one is free and open source. So those are the few of the apps that I was going to, that I went over. The ones that I'm most interested in trying long term is Jami and Qtalks. I tried Qtalks a little bit. I haven't tried Jami in terms of a call yet. I'm really looking forward to doing so because it really looks cool. And I just really kind of want to get myself off from Skype. I want to try to find something that's open source, but that really wasn't, you know, the point of it more. I just want to, I don't like being reliant on Skype because I have a feeling that sometimes Skype is just going to go away in favor of Microsoft Teams. And that's not a great feeling to know that the thing that you rely on to record your podcasts or whatever just might be yanked out away from you because Microsoft has moved on to something different. So that is it for this video. If you enjoyed it, give it a thumbs up. If not, we really do even appreciate the thumbs down because it means you've interacted with the video. 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