An installation of Skype in version 8.xx is a little bit different than it was with Skype 4.xx from what I found. As of writing this the current version of Skype is 8.11 and the procedure that I’ve checked on 2 computers was:
- Download DEB package with Skype from https://www.skype.com
- Check if GDebi is installed in your system. If not, install it from a repository. I used Synaptic package manager for this.
- Open downloaded DEB file (skypeforlinux-64.deb) with GDebi. To to this right-click on the file. On Linux Mint with Mate the context menu already contained “Open with GDebi” as the first menu-item. On Linux Ubuntu with Cinnamon one has to select “Open with…” menu-item and then select GDebi from the sub-menu.
- Click on “Install” button and provide your password
Done!
This worked for me under Linux Mint 17.3 and Linux Ubuntu 16.04 both being 64-bit.
Afterword
Please note that Skype is not an open-source software and I don’t recommend it. This article is just providing an instruction how to get latest Skype version working on Linux in case you need it.
If you know the open-source alternative to Skype that is available on Linux and allows video-calls and it quite stable and somehow popular then please let me know.
why do you use linux mint? better in any way than ubuntu?
Linux Mint is a close relative of Linux Ubuntu however it has some nice (for me) features out of the box. For instance: my favourite desktops (Mate/Cinnamon). Another reason is a colour theme that I find to be hard to change easy. Ubuntu is so brown-and-orange! On the other hand Mint is so grey-and-green what I prefer 🙂