By now you probably know a thing or two about Microsoft Skype… It’s a free app that allows users to communicate via instant messages, voice and video call – all for free, no matter what device they use Skype on….

Skype is available on phones, tablets, PCs, Macs and Linux and is used to make free Skype-to-Skype calls and text to stay in touch with friends and family….

A Linux version of Skype was recently updated.. and this adds some new features including, enhanced user interface, cloud-based group chat experience, PulseAudio support and file transfer improvements across multiple devices and bunch of other fixes….

To install or upgrade Skype, use the steps below

Step 1: Uninstall all Previous Versions

To install or upgrade, make sure you don’t already have previous versions installed. To get rid of Skype on Ubuntu, run the commands below

sudo apt-get purge skypeforlinux && sudo apt-get autoremove

Step 2: Installing / Upgrade Skype

Now that Skype is uninstalled, run the commands below to install a required package that Skype needs.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https -y

Then run the commands below to add Skype repository to Ubuntu. If curl isn’t installed, you may want to run sudo apt-get install curl before running the commands below or you may get an error the curl is not installed.

sudo apt-get install curl
curl https://repo.skype.com/data/SKYPE-GPG-KEY | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://repo.skype.com/deb stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/skype-stable.list

Finally, run the commands below to install Skype

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install skypeforlinux -y

That should prompt you to type and confirm your password before the installation can continue… When you’re done, Skype should be installed and ready to use… To launch it, go to the Activities Overview and search Skype and launch it.

Option #2: Install Skype via Snap

If the option above didn’t work for you… you can also install Skype via Snap package management….  This might be the quickest way to install Skype…

Snaps are applications packaged with all their dependencies to run on all popular Linux distributions from a single build. They update automatically and roll back gracefully…

sudo apt install snapd
sudo snap install skype --classic

That’s it!

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