The net is full of complaints about Microsoft force-feeding their user base a broken software for many. Complaints are about

1. Requiring the latest Mac OS X release – many have good reasons for not updating to Mavericks. Keeping previous versions workable has been the reason for the ubiquitous use of Skype:

“And no, I won’t update to Mavericks; I’m fine with the current version I have; thanks. So, plz, I do like skype, its awesome for work (which I use EVERYDAY) and keep in contact, but this is waaaaaaay out. PLEASE GIVE A SOLUTION. THANK YOU.”

2. Breaking support for Pulse Audio in Linux or other basic services means some Linux users are cut out of the users, too:

“In all your web content you people claim that forcing us to drop 4.2 and move to 4.3 improves our lives and makes our Skype experience better. If you have bothered to read all the responses in this topic, by now I hope you understand: YOU ARE NOT MAKING SKYPE BETTER FOR US. 4.3 breaks audio compatibility.” (comment #99 in the Linux thread)

Linux came to my rescue, in this particular case. My second step was, of course to install a VM with Fedora20, but as pulse audio seems to give people a problem, I connected the good old Sennheisers and lo and behold, it worked. But of course, Fedora in Parallels is quite a bit of a deviation from the righteous path I would like to be treading, so if Microsoft have some remaining customer orientation then it would be great to apply it to the info.plist (right click on Skype.app to look at its contents to see it and open it with textedit) that requires 10.9 to be running beneath Skype.app and make it read 10.6 instead. It’s not that complicated. The user may have to jump through additional hoops, which I did not try to do, while it should be an easy trick for the developers.

Thinking about it once again, some courageous user might wish to experiment with something along the lines of

sudo nano /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist

as described here, but I didn’t do it.

Why is Skype forcing a software upgrade on all of us? – Telecom Tech News.

2014-08-17 Update: As stated here, Skype has learnt to work with other operating systems than Mavericks again.