Arch Linux User Repository

Microsoft is finally shutting down Skype in May

There is a problem with Skype being stuck on the login screen on first launch. That happens when your org.freedesktop.secrets provider doesn't have a keyring configured, i.e. also first launch.

I don't know if this is a quirk of libsecret or Skype itself, but we can't do pretty much anything about it anyway.

Solutions are simple though:

1. Despite the login screen being stuck, the login itself is actually successful. So just kill it and run Skype again, it should be fine after that.

2. Configure your default keyring manually (using seahorse, kwalletmanager etc.) before running Skype.

To get automatic login, install a package that provides org.freedesktop.secrets, e.g. gnome-keyring.

To get a systray icon, install libappindicator-gtk3. On GNOME, then install the appindicator extension.

Microsoft is finally shutting down Skype in May

Thanks to Hanabishi for him skypeforlinux-bin 8.136.0.203-1 stable package!!!

You need to select the keyring as default. Works for me with KDE Wallet.

Configuring the default keyring manually doesn't help sadly. it was configured before and still is. But the solution 1 works. First login, get white screen in skype window. Close skype, but several processed keep hanging around (pgrep -l skype to verify). pkill skype until pgrep skype doesn't return anything anymore (or just rudely pkill -9 skype). Run skype again and you should be logged in.

There is a problem with Skype being stuck on the login screen on first launch. That happens when your org.freedesktop.secrets provider doesn't have a keyring configured, i.e. also first launch.

I don't know if this is a quirk of libsecret or Skype itself, but we can't do pretty much anything about it anyway.

Solutions are simple though:

1. Despite the login screen being stuck, the login itself is actually successful. So just kill it and run Skype again, it should be fine after that.

2. Configure your default keyring manually (using seahorse, kwalletmanager etc.) before running Skype.

Thanks for looking into it. So it seems it was just by chance that after installing those packages it all worked again. I now removed them, reboot the system and I didn't have any problems signing in. I didn't get those error messages and neither did Skype get stuck and had to relaunch. Before rebooting, though, I updated the system, so in the same way that the previous system update broke Skype for me, it seems that this last one has fixed it.

Also I found that it only happens on first launch if there is no existing default keyring/wallet configured. If you have existing default keyring properly configured, it works just fine.

I guess Skype simply doesn't like keyring init process for some reason. I.e. you need to manually configure your secret provider before.

I have some findings:

1. That warnings has nothing to do with the white login screen problem and always appear.

2. Installing gio-qt/glibmm/libsigc++ does not fix the issue. Despite the login screen appears broken, the login is actually successful, so Skype works just fine after relaunch. I guess you had wrong impression of them helping because of that.

So the actual source of the problem is unknown. It could probably be an incompatibility with some library versions between Arch and snap image.

Hmm, yeah, now I see it. Fresh log in fails, even with KDE Wallet. I will investigate it.

I did try to start with a clean ~/.config/skypeforlinux/ and only then is when I got those error messages that helped me to solve the issue (before it just got stuck after entering the password without any error message). Maybe it all has to do with gnome-keyring, even though I was trying to login manually entering my username and password. If you log out and manually try to log in again, does it work for you without those packages?