Installing Skype On Linux Is Much Easier Now!

Skype requires no introduction! It is one of the popular telecommunication application for making voice and video calls, sending text messages, sharing your screen, photos, videos, documents, and files with your family and friend etc., no matter what device you use Skype on. In the earlier days (and nowadays too), Skype is being widely used for job interviews and meeting clients worldwide. It works on almost all devices, including the mobile phones, tablets, PCs, Macs, and Linux. In the past, we had to manually compile and install it or depend on any third-party repositories to install Skype. Good thing is Microsoft has released Skype as Snap app, so installing Skype on Linux is not a big deal now.

Installing Skype On Linux

Since Microsoft launched Skype application as a snap to cater to more Linux users, we need to install Snapd first. if you haven't install Snapd on your Linux system yet, refer this link. Make sure your Snapd version is >=2.40 version. If you use old version of snapd, you will get an error like below when installing snaps.

error: unknown flag `classic'

To check for the Snapd version, run:

$ snap --version
snap    2.42.5
snapd   2.42.5
series  16
ubuntu  18.04
kernel  5.3.0-28-generic

After installing snapd, search if Skype is available in the snap store using command:

$ snap find skype

Sample output:

Name                    Version                 Publisher       Notes    Summary
skype                   8.56.0.102              skype*          classic  One Skype for all your devices. New features. New look. All Skype.
audio-recorder          3.0.5+rev1432+pkg-7b07  brlin           -        A free audio-recorder for Linux (EXTREMELY BUGGY)
guvcview                2.0.6+pkg-f796          brlin           -        A simple v4l2 full-featured video grabber
spreedme                0.29.5snap1             nextcloud*      -        Spreed.ME audio/video calls and conferences feature for the Nextcloud Snap
ramboxpro               1.2.2                   ramboxapp*      -        Rambox Pro
discord-yamiyukisenpai  0.0.9                   yamiyukisenpai  -        Free voice and text chat

Yes, it is available in the snap store. Let us go ahead and install it.

Please be mindful that this revision of snap "skype" was published using classic confinement and thus may perform arbitrary system changes outside of the security sandbox that snaps are usually confined to, which may put your system at risk. If you understand the risk and still want to proceed, run the following command to install Skype:

$ sudo snap install skype  --classic

Once installed, launch it either from the application launcher or Terminal by typing the following command:

$ skype

Login using your skype id and password or create a new id if you don;t have one already.

Not happy with Skype? It's alright! You can uninstall it using command:

$ sudo snap remove skype