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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_installation_software Because Windows only has one installer.

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/41531554-d5ef-4f2c-8fb9-149bdc5c8a701033.mspx because Windows has only one binary.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Top-10-Windows-7-Features-3-XP-Mode/1243378978 because different versions of Windows all work the same way.

These are all chosen for you by whoever makes the software. Or you can compile it yourself on Windows. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/BuildingWinPidgin

Look, if you go with a distribution that is modern, you'll have none of those issues unless you go out of your way to the point that you'd have the same problems on Windows. Ubuntu is going to have you use one package manager that will make you not even have to think about binary formats or package formats.

Where exactly are you seeing software that isn't niche that requires any extra work on Linux? I've had to shoe horn software badly made at work into working on Linux. Through Wine and various other methods since I prefer a Linux Desktop. I found it easier than the headache that most people there go through with Windows. Am I just crazy? I consider what I had to do out of my way and annoying as a Linux desktop goes.

I tell them that they're actually clicking "Yes please, install this virus on my computer" over and over again, every time they want a new free, useless desktop widget or application or game produced by a company no one's heard of

What company that you've heard of publishes applications like Pidgin or games like Lockjaw? But because these are free software, it's more likely that someone has looked over the source code for you.

Wait, wait. . . did you just make an argument that because some random poster on /. downplayed a request for touchscreen support, that Linux developers don't care about requests for less-popular but potentially useful features?

Pidgin devs don't...

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/8809

Use the encryption capabilities in Pidgin.

http://pidgin.im/

Apparently the ones who can't are busy working on Pidgin.

I use the libpurple-based Mac OS X client Adium, and there is a plug-in available called Challenge/Response. This plug-in will intercept any messages from users not already on my buddy list and ask any question I like; if the user gets it right, I am asked to block/allow the user as if the plug-in wasn't even there. I used to be flooded with spam whenever I used my old MSN/Windows Live! account, but now I never get one bit of spam.

Windows and Linux/*NIX users should check out Adium's sister project Pidgin, and you can use the Bot Sentry or pidgin-privacy-please plug-ins to the same effect.

maybe they will finally get video and audio chat working.

It was on the list of projects last year.
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/SummerOfCode2008

Also FFmpeg, which developed many of the codecs, is participating
http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=FFmpeg_Summer_Of_Code

Wars with the users about which features of Pidgin to implement, and why certain features have been dropped or changed have been waged repeatedly. If I may be so bold, I think I can summarize the Pidgin devs' attitude: "We're writing Pidgin for our own enjoyment and not for the purpose of attempting to gain as much IM client market share as possible. Nobody's forcing you to use it." They also use the "patches welcome" approach: "If you want a feature, write it, and we'll consider it." I have probably mis-stated/-paraphrased/-summarized at least some of their opinion, so have a look at the Pidgin mailing lists and trac tickets for some animated discussions.

Wars with the users about which features of Pidgin to implement, and why certain features have been dropped or changed have been waged repeatedly. If I may be so bold, I think I can summarize the Pidgin devs' attitude: "We're writing Pidgin for our own enjoyment and not for the purpose of attempting to gain as much IM client market share as possible. Nobody's forcing you to use it." They also use the "patches welcome" approach: "If you want a feature, write it, and we'll consider it." I have probably mis-stated/-paraphrased/-summarized at least some of their opinion, so have a look at the Pidgin mailing lists and trac tickets for some animated discussions.

Wars with the users about which features of Pidgin to implement, and why certain features have been dropped or changed have been waged repeatedly. If I may be so bold, I think I can summarize the Pidgin devs' attitude: "We're writing Pidgin for our own enjoyment and not for the purpose of attempting to gain as much IM client market share as possible. Nobody's forcing you to use it." They also use the "patches welcome" approach: "If you want a feature, write it, and we'll consider it." I have probably mis-stated/-paraphrased/-summarized at least some of their opinion, so have a look at the Pidgin mailing lists and trac tickets for some animated discussions.

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords RTFM

Are you serious?? Openfire for the XMPP (aka Jabber) server, and Pidgin for the client. If setup correctly, you can force SSL/TLS encryption. I've implemented this at my company and it's rock solid. Beats the hell out of any proprietary solution you'll find, if IM is your main goal. I'd recommend setting up XMPP service DNS records for your domain for a really slick implementation.

http://www.pidgin.im/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin

http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/

So how about Pidgin with the OTR plugin? afaik you can't get more secure than OTR with IM, and it's available for a few different clients.

Use Alfresco for document sharing.

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/vv


Yeah, exactly what I thought.

Pidgin doesn't intend to develop video-chat

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/VoiceAndVideo

"Making good progress: it works"

So its coming along.

Pidgin? They're able to communicate with humans!

I'm sure you're thinking of pigeons.

Just make sure that you're not using an insecure Jabber client like Pidgin over Tor!

Pidgin doesn't do certificate checks so it is trivial for Tor exit nodes to do man in the middle attacks. This is a serious security flaw that has been around for years that no one wants to treat as such for some reason.

Here's some documentation:
here
here

Also, if anyone here has the ability to get the developers of Pidgin to actually be interested in fixing this security vulnerability, that would be great.... Hell, I'd settle for someone at least treating this as a security issue instead of just a feature request.

Sorry for the bitterness... I have just been waiting for a fix for this vulnerability for a long time.

Yup, every since I upgraded to Fedora 9, neither pidgin nor licq can connect to the ICQ network anymore. Pidgin can sign on using the AIM protocol though, and if I send a message to an ICQ number, it will go through and I can chat.

The networks are merged, but the recent clients can't chat using the new protocol. licq 1.3.5 says "Unknown signon error: 0x1c" and pidgin 2.4.2 says "The client version you are using is too old. Please upgrade at http://pidgin.im/"

Version 2.4.3 was released in near-record time to fix the ICQ problem in 2.4.2. http://www.pidgin.im/

if you don't want to download the newest version of pidgin, this bug report lists what byte you can edit in liboscar.dll (or just download the patched liboscar.dll) http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/6220

Pidgin has released an update to fix it.

The MSN plugin is notoriously broken too, and not only because they haven't implemented MSNP14 yet; i'm not talking about camera support nor similar bullshit, but to be able to have a chat without messages bouncing with error or being disconnected altogether - i submited that bug myself, but a quick search will reveal a lot of people with similar issues. I hear the MSN developers were frustrated with the project in the sense that some requirements or patches were met with indiference or ignored altogheter.

It's a crying shame, because ever since 2.2.0, Pidgin is (otherwise) a fantastic IM client. The UI has been polished to a shine, and the program itself works faster and with a lesser footprint than previous versions. There's a lot of very nice plugins, and some nice work in progress too. I don't mind about games, but i agree - i'd rather have better IM support any time sooner.

Also, quite a few projects have pulled the source to previous releases (a violation of the GPL that these projects were released under; gaim is one of them). Their management of projects and overall administration leaves MUCH to be desired.

My personal favorites are the project to add Voice and Video to pidgin and the Pidgin theming project. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/VoiceAndVideo and http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/ThemeImprovements . People always ask for these things and the developers don't have time to do things that they don't use, so they never get done. Hopefully these actually get done by the end of this summer.

My personal favorites are the project to add Voice and Video to pidgin and the Pidgin theming project. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/VoiceAndVideo and http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2008/ThemeImprovements . People always ask for these things and the developers don't have time to do things that they don't use, so they never get done. Hopefully these actually get done by the end of this summer.

One of the best is pidgin, which runs a wide range of protocols. That's a step in the right direction and helps wean people off of MSN and into better services and more useful technologies.

However, from the article it looks like the problem is at the MS servers. So staying on MSN, even with a better client, is still helping feed money (via ads and such) into more anti-competitive behavior and barriers to interoperability.

What should also be mentions is that MSIE now gives 'security' warning messages when accessing Google's Gmail. No. I neither use nor condone use of MS in any way shape or form, but I do check up on those who claim they feel compelled to do so and use them to check periodically. Now that MS is going after Google, Gmail gets the errors. Now that MS is going after Youtube, it gets MS errors, too.

The courts don't won't can't keep up with all these illegal/unethical anti-competitive tactics. The only effective option is to just stop funding it. And that boils down to not using the products, formats, protocols or services tied to that company.

While you probably can't call the Pidgin developers wild-eyed radicals (heck, a fair number of us don't use any software projects started after about 1998 with any regularity

Remember, at the end of the day, it is the developers' sweat and effort that go into the software, so the buck stops there.

From http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4986

"04/14/2008 06:57:17 AM changed by ConnorBehan Â

This is unbelievable. I tried adding my support to this sensible ticket, hoping all of us would cumulatively hold some sway over the developers (there are now three times as many posts below my first post as there are above).

I tried discussing this in IRC but the biggest promise I could get was elb saying that we might get manual resizing back if people are still complaining about this in three years (I was later blocked from #pidgin). This "wontfix" position has me even more worried now.

I tried letting it rest. Clearly many people replying to this ticket are much better at articulating their opinions than me. I had made my position known and there was no point belaboring it.

So we're only making it worse by complaining? Then what should we do... NOT complain? We are in a no win situation here.

If we had kept our mouths shut, respected your so called wisdom and refrained from getting involved... would you have really said "We will bring back auto-resizing because it looks like the users are considerate enough to deserve our attention." Absolutely not, you would not even know that people hated the auto-resizing if this were the case.

Now lets say most people kept their mouth shut but maybe 10 people or so posted well thought out constructive criticism on these forums. Then you would say we are a "vocal minority." I heard those exact words used on IRC. According to Ethan Blanton, some people did request an intelligent text box that you didn't have to resize. I'm not sure how many people requested this but something tells me it wasn't a majority either. If you really require a majority vote to revert a feature you are looking at over a million users.

Ok so getting the majority of Pidgin users to voice their opinions is not realistic, so we did the next best thing. We got a good one hundred people to respond to this ticket. It may not be a million but we did our best. Now what are you telling us? That our attitudes are so ungrateful that you are losing interest in reverting the feature?

What if by some miracle, hundreds of people HAD replied to this forum but had kept their cool and discussed the matter logically for these two months without getting impatient? Then you would say what seanegan already said... that users were just repeating "the same tired old points."

So if we complain, we lose, if we don't complain, we lose. Is there any way we can bow down to you and earn enough of your respect for you to consider this tiny code change? Of course not, there is no way to convince the developers that manual resizing is better. Their vision of what Pidgin should be is non-negotiable and every response to this ticket (the kind ones and the not-so-kind ones) has only reinforced that they are the ones in charge and that there is absolutely nothing we can do.

Gaim has always been very special to me. It was only the second open source application I ever used (after Firefox) and played a huge role introducing me to the world of GNU/Linux and other free software. Perhaps I am just afraid of change, and could eventually get used to auto-resizing. But now I am going to send one of your questions back down this two way street. I am not going to be open minded about auto-resizing because YOUR attitudes have not convinced me to change my lifestyle this way.

Alas, there is no way to restore manual resizing to the main branch of the program we used to love. Sure there are probably thousands of us who would be happier with manual resizing, and sure we helped make Pidgin what it is today, but the developers don't work for us, they work for themselves. We are just a bad case of FSUES.

I would rather let the user decide what features go into a program. Naturally there are limits to this... we don't want Pidgin to be a text editor, a web browser, an newsreader and an email clien

This whole debacle has been specifically addressed already. Shut up and go read it before you start spouting: http://pidgin.im/~elb/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/giving_back.html

By the way, the actual resizing part in funpidgin is done by a plugin that works in vanilla pidgin. At first I supported the idea of this fork, but then I realized it's really arbitrary and stupid, especially when it's basically just readding portions of old pidgin code and including a plugin that adds back resizing.
Here's the plugin, for those that are interested. I installed it but then realized that I don't really care about resizing my input box.
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/5296

I personally have noticed a certain lack of willingness to listen to user input on the part of Pidgin developers; I knew it was a matter of time before something like this happened.

In my case, I've had a gripe about the new version of Pidgin quietly removing message delivery failure notifications from AIM (this comes up in a few use cases relating to the invisibility feature in the protocol). After searching around, I saw another user report this same exact issue on the Pidgin trac. After very long and tedious explanations from the user of this small issue (and not-quite-coherent rebuttals from the developer), the responding developer basically ignored whatever else the user had to say.

For a change (I usually don't take active participation in bug tracking), I decided to second this feature request/bug on the pidgin trac.

However, after seconding the original user, another developer came out and quite vindictively said that he would "personally" oppose any change to "their" code relating to this, without giving a reasoned reply. He based this on "how he understands" the system should work; for him, this was a way of standing up against invisibility features in various protocols (though clearly, there is a desire for invisibility among users).

In addition to such opposition to seemingly trivial additions to the code, the Pidgin developers staunchly oppose removal of things like this from the trac. Irrelevant political views should be kept out of a high-visibility open source project, I think, or at least should be kept from being totally condescending to everyone else.

Hopefully this fork teaches them a lesson about listening to their user base. In reality, though, it will likely be ignored for the most part and the Pidgin developers will continue on paying zero attention to user requests.

In addition, I hope the forked project will include a master password option which the devs have refused to add since forever. I don't buy their excuses for not doing it. Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird pull it off quite well.

I suggest everyone read this developers take on the issue. I think you will find it quite a bit more understanding than the original post makes it out to be.

In case one is unwilling or unable to use Funpidgin, and as soon as the site is unSlashdotted, here is a plugin that disables this "feature"...

I'm not sure where you are looking. This works, and here is another mirror, and here's one more just for kicks.
Still need more?

They're stored in plaintext.

So what?

http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords

The fact that it's plaintext is meaningless. If the computer is encrypting them and can decrypt them for use, they're as good as plaintext anyway.

There isn't even security through obscurity. Seriously.

Evolution can switch spelling on-the-fly, and even do multiple language spelling.

pidgin however still has the problems you describe, the FAQ/help has the following to say about that
----
How do I change the language for the Highlight Misspelled words option?

Pidgin currently only supports spell checking in your locale language. This is because gtkspell 2 does not offer a good way for us to know which dictionaries are available or to switch between them. This functionality has long been promised for gtkspell version 3, which has been delayed somewhat indefinitely. See gtkspell.sf.net.

There is, however a simple plugin called switchspell that can change the spell check language on a per-buddy basis.
----
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Pidgin

Is it just me, or is becoming trendy in open source development to introduce changes your userbase hates because the active developers think they know what's good for them?

Another shining example of this recently is pidgin. In the most recent version (2.4.0) they introduced a change to the IM window that automatically sizes the area you type in. The default size is 2 lines and you cannot resize this area at all. They claim that this is all most users need but I hate the sizing - as you start typing it will resize itself and generally I like having that area be around 3-4 lines. But more importantly I want to be able to redesign the damn typing area like I've been able to do since I started using AIM 10 years ago.

Support for AIM Offline Messages was added in Pidgin 2.4.0, released February 29, 2008: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ChangeLog

Supports "the big four." And then some.

I'm looking at you, Pidgin. The account setup list doesn't even hint that XMPP is AKA jabber. That's self destructive pedantry right there.

Linux is Linux is Linux

While that is the case superficially, every release of every distro comes with different versions of the various shared libraries. That leaves the following possibilities:

1. Ship software as source and expect customers to compile it
2. Provide source and get popular enough so that the distros do the compilation for you
3. Provide the software yourself, and pick some subset of all Linux distros/versions to support

Note that for Windows you can provide a single setup.exe and it will run on everything from Windows 98 through Vista.

Here are some examples of Linux applications:

• Opera where they pick a sizable number and versions of distros
• pidgin CentOS/RHEL/Fedora
• skype where they have 8 variations
• Oracle supports RHEL, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Asianux

Basically a closed source vendor has to pick a limited number of distros and versions for logistical reasons. You'll also notice that they typically only support x86 processors, but it is rare indeed to see something like PowerPC Linux support. The Linux Standards Base was supposed to address this, but for example they said RPM is the standard packaging mechanism. That annoys anyone using Debian, Slackware etc. If they had picked Deb as the standard then it would have annoyed Redhat/Fedora/Suse etc instead.

So in summary, Linux is only Linux is only Linux if you provide your software as source. Even then, if the distros don't package you then you'll still end up supporting a subset of all versions of all distros of all processors.

Like this one:
http://www.pidgin.im/

1. new people available to projects
2. old people now unavailable to project

I observe that at this time, the increase in new people on the Internet dwarfs changes in either rate. True, the loss of key players can kill a project. Just because more middle-class white males may be forces to stop working on 'F/OSS' will not mean the end of F/OSS. OpenSource is not a business in competition with proprietary software. And as long as a project is Opensource, someone can dig up the old tapes and start patching away. The pool of raw talent is growing. Invite these new people in, they might be able to help.

Inability to upgrade, leads to more intense skill sets.

I agree that manufactures have been dumbing down the documentation. This is done not only to be friendly to the Aunt Mable crowd, but also protect this new "Intellectual Property" that the marketing department has gotten the legal department worked up about.

However, real - or open - standards vs fake - de-facto / Microsoft - standards are published in their gory detail. Many many books are published today on the details of how things work, worked and will work. However, you must go to your library and read them to benefit. Today many people want instahacking sk1llz at the push of button. Unfortunately, the real world is also garbage-in/garbage-out. Those 3rd world folks are required to put in the effort to make work what is just a push-of-a-button away for 1st world people. The difference if subtle: they have to read, you ought to read.

And, to top it off, I resent the SourceForge and all such "organizations". I much enjoy and miss, the days when each project had it's off-beat web-site hanging off of some obscure computer connection, or even hosted by some free hosting site like Geocities. Greatly enhanced the fealing of individuality and added a lot of color to the Linux community. When Sourceforge came around, it so much feals corporate, institutionalized and all the horrible things that most of us hate.

Enhanced the fealing (sic) of individuality? Don't you mean ugly?

Hmmm, let's see: sourceforge provides webhosting and other tools for a project, but how many still have their own websites?

• Slashcode @ sf.net points to slashcode.org
• keepass project's site is keypass.info
• filezilla is hosted at filezilla-project.org
• The TortoiseSVN project has a nice site at tortoisesvn.net
• Clamwin uses clamwin.com
• many more...

And that was just from clicking randomly on the top 10 downloads page. (Technically I also hit sourceforge's own project, but can you really blame sourceforge for hosting at sourceforge?) I don't really see the addition of a useful 'professional' index really impacting the 'feals' (sic) of the projects. I think it's less geocites and more "it's only 100 bucks, just register the domain already."

You still end up at some obscure computer connection for many projects. Not everything is a myproject.sourceforce.com site. However, for tiny projects they get free hosting and some do fairly