How we tested...

Clearly we want the ability to make audio and video calls, but most of the tools here are capable of much more. Since many of the programs aren’t bundled in the software repositories of many distributions, we’ll be looking at ease of installation. We’re interested in a tool that doesn’t compromise usability in favour of features.

These days, communicating with others isn’t without risk, so we’ll be studying the security and privacy protection on offer. This is because these programs can be used to share files with other users.

Apart from one-on-one communications, we want to test how these programs handle more users and whether they make it easy to set up groups.

We’re running all these tools on a Fedora 27 machine with 4GB RAM – the minimum for transmitting video.