What distro are you running? It must be sort of out there that you're having such difficulties. I'm running Arch which is not widely supported, but user submitted build recipes (think brew on OSX but with way more options) work 95% of the time (e.g., no trouble with Skype, Spotify, etc.)
Once you install yaourt or packer though it's really easy to at least see if the AUR package works (Skype works fine, e.g.). If not then maybe you're on your own, but if you're having trouble it can still be useful to see how someone else built it in the past.
