Some time ago I tried skype… now I wanted to use it to call someone, tried starting it… the main window came up, and immedeately closed itself again.

Nothing I can do about it, no error message, nothing I could do differently.

So I was looking for a different/newer version, and found out that Skype itself provides downloads for Skype on Debian. Except they are uninstallable.

What a crap! Use an open standard, like SIP, which works much better - and where you can use different applications such as linphone or kphone.