Re: [tlug] Skype or Something Better?

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

As with Daniel and Jim, I also recommend Google Hangouts. The huge
advantage of it is that anybody with a Google account, be it
@gmail.com or GSuite (formerly known as Google Apps for Work) and a
half-way functioning web browser already has it. (But they do need to
remember to turn it on in the Gmail settings!)

It handles text, voice and video chats (logging all the text chats in
your Gmail archive) and, unlike quite a number of other applications,
allows you to show a window or your screen to others in the call
(though it does not do not remote control) which is surprisingly
handy. That's many times let me debug something a lot faster than
I could have done otherwise without having to send images around
or install an actual remote control application.

And it runs basically everywhere with your conversations shared
everywhere. So there's no problem with me moving between my phone, a
couple of tables and a half-dozen PCs with no interruptions to my
conversations and full chat history everywhere.

Pretty much everybody is encrypted between the clients and the server,
so that's not generally something I'd worry about. End-to-end
encryption is a different thing, but it's not actually as totally
useful as you might think because it's not free. As is probably
obvious when you think about it for a moment, end to end encryption is
between a pair of devices so, when active, those messages you received
on and sent from your phone are completely inaccessible from any other
device. Maybe others don't switch around between devices as much as I
do, but that's basically what's kept me from using end-to-end
encryption except when I really feel I need it.

Riot sounds pretty good, though I've had only the briefest glance at
it. The documentation on the web site was horrible; I created an
account on what I guess is the riot.io server but couldn't even figure
out how to join Freenode IRC channels with it. (Anybody want to tell
me how to do that?) And they don't have a YUM package, which annoys me
because I use CentOS at work. (For good reasons, but believe you me it
isn't because CentOS is a good desktop OS. :-))

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch