While I'm unsure about the inability to join calls, I can at least agree that the Linux client is terrible.<p>I finally caved a few months ago, got an account, and started using it ("oh wow it handles 's/woops/fixed/', that's awesome")... until the client began freezing, chewing 100% CPU for as long as I patiently left it running, and not getting itself sorted out. Removing ~/.Skype (XDG, anybody?) and re-signing in worked... for about 3 minutes, at which point my profile data re-synced, and the client began choking again.<p>Last I tried the Web-integrated version (Skype icon, top-right of outlook.com et. al., takes a minute to become clickable) I couldn't even type "/me ..." - the line would send verbatim. At that point I gave up completely.<p>I used to use IRC but I find it too Spartan nowadays, but on the other hand I don't want to have to remember what chat tab is in what window, and I can't handle the idea of running 15 isolated instances of Webkit for all the separate chat systems out there, so that kills websites and most current "desktop" chat clients.<p>I don't use the Internet to communicate much, somewhat ironically. Everything drives me to distraction.<p>Notes:<p>- XDG: TL;DR = says stuff should be in ~/.config, ~/.cache, etc. <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory_support" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory_supp...</a><p>- I cannot help but admire the reverse-engineering going on at <a href="https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypeweb#skypeweb-plugin-for-pidgin" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/EionRobb/skype4pidgin/tree/master/skypewe...</a> to make the outlook/skype web integration programmatically consumable. I have no idea how it works but the commits are very recent, which is a big positive sign.