After more than 3 years of development, Skype for Linux has lost its beta tag and hit version 4.0. An update that landed on Thursday codenamed “Four Rooms for Improvement” sees the app catapult from version 2.2 to 4.0, closing the gap that had existed between the various desktop versions of the VoIP client.
If you have used Skype on Windows or Mac OS X recently then the changes won’t strike you as particularly new, but Linux users have been waiting a while for such an update. The Skype team have highlighted four main areas in which major improvements have been made, and they are:
- A unified view for all text chats, rather than separate windows for each.
- A brand new view for voice calls.
- Improved audio quality.
- Improved video quality as well as a wider range of supported cameras.
Version 4.0 is a big update seeing further improvements to stability, synchronisation between chats, load speeds and localisation as the Czech and Norwegian are added to the list of supported languages. The Skype team have advised users to be patient the first time they run the new version, noting:
“The very first time you start Skype for Linux 4.0 [it] might take a few minutes (depending on how lengthy your chat history is). Please do not close Skype during this time. Subsequent starts will load much more quickly.”
The new release is available for download from the Skype for Linux homepage, with versions available for 64 and 32-bit installs of Ubuntu and Debian, as well as 32-bit editions for Fedora and OpenSUSE.
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