Re: [gentoo-user] Jitsi or Other Skype Alternative

["Marc Stürmer" <mail@marc-stuermer.de>]

Am 23.08.2013 12:50, schrieb the:
> Does that mean that I should buy hardware to match software requirements?

Do you really want to tell me that you are still working on a Pentium 
133 with maybe 64 MB of RAM?

I mean it has always been like that: people buy indeed hardware to match 
software requirements, e.g. to play better games or to watch Youtube 
videos in High Definition.

Of course no one is going to force you to do so, so if you are happy 
with less power you need less, of course.

The point for Skype, last time I am going to repeat that, is that it 
works out of the box for the normal user and the large user base. You 
need no bachelor in computer sciences to set it up and get it running, 
even your proverbial grandma in mind is able to do that.

And that's what 99% of Skype frankly care about at all: that it works 
that way. They don't really care about nerdy themes like bugs, privacy 
concerns, backdoors, whatever - it works for them good enough, cheap and 
reliable and that's what's counts at all.

So if you really want a piece of software to replace Skype, it depends 
on your goals: just for talking over the internet you can take a 
VoIP-program like Ekiga and so on. But if you want to replace Skype with 
something better, you first need to recognize why it got so popular in 
first place and make something even better for its user base. Or - 
another way - just buy the company behind it.

And in modern times like ours I personally and frankly think that 
telling "OMFG Skype uses so much RAM" is not really something most 
people care about anymore at all. I mean, even really cheap computers 
you can buy today, have at last around 4 GB of RAM, being a multitude of 
RAM being necessary to run Skype smoothly.

And because most Gentoo users are being used to compile their own stuff 
(until they use Sabayon), their computers are normally being far from 
underpowered.

Of course, if you do care about it - don't use it, it is that simple. 
But don't expect the rest of it to share your point of view and do it 
likewise.

For normal users it is like: all software sucks and they tend to use 
that piece of software which sucks less for them. If their favorite 
piece of software starts to suck more, then they are going to another 
piece of software, but not before.