> The linux version has never been on parity with the others That may be true, but in my experience, I could barely get skype running on an old windows box: it

> The linux version has never been on parity with the others That may be true, but in my experience, I could barely get skype running on an old windows box: it would routinely grind the system to a halt. In 2010 I switched to that box to SuSE 11, where Skype, though a bear to set up, ran smoothly, with a non-noticable frame rate and better-than-TV graphics on old hardware (circa 2003 2GHz Dell with 1 GB RAM. It did that while providing NFS filesharing to another computer playing movies and a laptop playing audio. The audio setup hassle had all the features of any other sound setup headache in Linux. I lay that problem squarely in the lap of the Linux sound community.