Schaller: The long journey towards good free video conferencing

In my experience, gtalk is vastly nicer and easier to use than skype. I almost always seriously struggle to make skype work, especially if you have anything unusual in your audio chain (e.g. using jack). GTalk however has not just debs provided but an apt repo and really does seem to "just work". Presumably it's less secure than skype, but it does seem to "just work" much more than skype on linux. Also, at work, we've used Google+'s "hang outs" which are basically video conference calls over gtalk. They also seem to work pretty well - screen sharing etc. Echo cancellation is an issue though...