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Linux-Based Instant Messaging for non-English Users?
An anonymous reader asks: "Like many others these past few weeks, I took the time to download the latest RedHat (replace with your favorite distro here) and upgrade my system. Despite the usual mail hangovers (corporate mail is still Outlook through POP3, etc.), the new *Office suites are great and I can almost dump Windows. However I was amazed at the sorry state of Linux instant messaging. Before you flame me, mod me down or doom me to a lifetime of Windows usage, allow me to explain: I am not a native English speaker, and it seems that every single Windows IM client I use (except Trillian) can deal properly with accented characters. Worse, every third-party Linux client I have tried deals with them differently, resulting in garbled (vaguely Unicode-ish) junk! Does the Slashdot crowd (especially the non-English folk) have a solution for this? (Short of VMware and Win32 clients, that is. Wine doesn't work at all for me)"
"Portuguese (Continental) is my native language, and I speak French, Spanish, some German and (after spending quite a few months in Poland on a project) passable Polish. I speak those languages practically every other day, and besides e-mail, I have taken to using MSN and Yahoo to discuss work with my clients and colleagues.
I have thus far tried GAIM (both the RedHat 8.0 bundled and the CVS versions), Kopete, Everybuddy, the native Yahoo! (which crashes more often than not and does not even deserve the 'beta' moniker), and none of them are suitable. IRC does the job, sure, but most of the people I have to reach can't use it (firewalls, usually) and won't install another IM client, so the solution has got to be at my end."
No, Windows does not use an 8-bit character set. It's far more complex than that, and I (who happen to have mostly the same problem) personally blame it on the laziness of English-native programmers.
:)
Trillian, for one, does not support accented characters properly either, and it's a Win32 app. If it handled ISO-8859-1 encoding properly, it might just about work.
Gaim, AFAIK, suffers from the same malaise, and I could never get the Linux Yahoo client to run twice properly (I have to keep removing the ~/.ymessenger dir)
Fire (http://www.epicware.com, for the Mac) allows you to select different character encodings, and I have nearly perfect interaction with Win 32 clients once I figure out their settings (except for Yahoo, who are notoriously finicky and keep changing their protocol)
And as for the "Just speak English" replies... Well... That's an attitude problem I certainly am glad half the world doesn't have.
I just opened a window in each and sent a friend a message copied and pasted from a Spanish website. The messages went through just fine with accented characters and all.
Try it with, say, Hindi or Hebrew or Thai - a language with completely different characters, not just accents.
The state of Linux IM *is* unfortunately pretty awful. The only consolation is that Windows IM isn't all that much better.
Let's take a look.
Pros: no Linux IM client that I know of has ads or relies extensively on client-side security (*cough* ICQ).
Cons:
* There is no Linux ICQ client that can consistently transfer files to Windows users. GnomeICU doesn't support it with any recent ICQ version. Licq requires you to convince the other person to manually flip a protocol switch and only sometimes works then. Licq's file transfer does not work with Trillian (which is growing in popularity). There's a host of IM dead projects, all of which only partly work.
* Protocol lag. I don't know of anything that can *fully* speak the new ICQ protocols.
* Periodically doesn't work. Not sure how bad this is on GAIM these days, but it used to be awful as AOL and MS duked it out. Sudden, unexpected protocol changes are the name of the game.
* Only reasonable ICQ front end requires Qt: Licq is the most usable Linux ICQ client I know of, and the best gtk front end *sucks*, with only one feature over the qt version (auto-establishment of secure connections). It's unstable, doesn't have middle-button-opening of message windows, doesn't highlight usernames in the username clist...
* Gabber *could* be an answer, but isn't. There's a really nice, secure Jabber client called Gabber. Unfortunately, no one *uses* Jabber, and the gateways to other protocols for it are flaky as hell.
* talk is dead. It was the most reliable system I've ever used to talk to people on any computer system, VMS or UNIX.
Meanwhile, IM continues to be a crucial part of the desktop, even entering the business world. I'd like to see Red Hat on some of the groups shaping this stuff (as Microsoft and AOL are). I'd *hate* the standard protocol to be unencrypted or have a message size limit, or rely on propriatary Windows libraries.
May we never see th