Linux Instant Messengers

mrAshley writes "This article talks specifically about the antiquated state of the even the best Linux instant messenging software, and generally about the need for software developers to be mindful of younger people, as their social attitudes towards software are going to be much more influential in than any moral or financial consideration. Simply put - People are communal. Don't make a person who wants to use Linux have to leave behind a method or style of communication."

Comments

gaim works for me, but loses ground from here

[yagu]

I think gaim does a pretty good job, and I've actually converted lots of friends to gaim with no negative after taste. And most love the tabbed interface for multiple conversations in one window. It's nice also to have multiple protocols all available in the one application. My parents now chat with multiple people, in multiple environments, and they're not even aware that's happening. No more splaining that they have to start the yahoo messenger if they want to talk with Uncle Duane.

There's also the huge value add of no advertising.

But, I seem never to be able to upgrade gaim, at least not easily. I always have to do an rpm upgrade with the Force option because of "conflicts" with other gaim packages. And the last couple of new releases of gaim won't even install with "Force".

So, for my money, gaim comes close. Depending on the user, I've found many are okay using gaim.

As for the "state of the union" in Windows, with the recently announced merger of the Yahoo and MSN protocols (as in, freely communicate with each other), it does appear Microsoft is making its move to get closer to their tipping point to dominate the messaging market. They have some interesting features, none that I can't live without, but probably a good draw for the "hip" young crowd. I find most of the described features annoying, but then, I come from the old BSD/Sun "talk" days. Heck I guess I even come from the old Unix "write" days (get out your history books).

Let Microsoft add the fluff. But, a cautionary note, if history serves, what Microsoft is doing has the petina of old tricks. Should they manage to climb to the top and snuff out other IM services the way they've snuffed out other competitors I predict they once again will begin charging for what once was free. Or at least start charging for features that used to be free but have become addictive to their target demographic. (Hey, little girl/boy, want some streaming video with your chat?)

Re:gaim works for me, but loses ground from here

[Seumas]

Is it possible to use an AOL IM account with Gaim and talk with people on Jabber? Is there any IM client that can do that? Thanks.

Um. Yeah.... That's the entire point of Jabber. If you want to use an AOL account, use a jabber server that has an AIM transport. Same with Yahoo! and any of the others.

This whole complaint for the article is just stupid. Yeah, using linux really cuts you out from being able to communicate with people what with there only being a crapload of chat clients for it of which tkabber, Gabber, PSI and GAIM are only a few of the some 30 Jabber clients for the platform.

Re:gaim works for me, but loses ground from here

[ajlitt]

I can hear it now (apologies to any elderly nerdettes out there):

"Grandma, simply unpack the tarball, run ./configure; make, sudo to root, then make install.

C'mon, don't unpack it in your home directory! Don't you store all of your source-built apps somewhere?

No, Grandma, you forgot to install the header packages for GTK. But it's so easy! Why do you have to make this so difficult?!

Fine. Go watch your stories. I'll have it finished by the time Matlock is over."

Am I missing something?

[dfn_deux]

Gaim and kopete both have all the functionality of the major IM clients. Gaim is available for both windows and linux and also seems to get protocol fixes and other bugs patched much more quickly than the commercial equivalent, trillian...

Younger people ?

[leonmergen]

Younger people ?

As far as I'm concerned, there are a lot of people out there using instant messengers... my friends, my mom, my dad, people from work, people at college... it's not just teens using instant messengers, it's a huge community using them.

And yes, I personally miss features like displaying which song you're currently listening too, and heck, since the latest MSN version I can't even see their "mood" anymore...

And yer yer, I could just ask them, I know... it's just that my friends seem to have a hell lot of fun using MSN, and I'm just happy I can finally show people my MSN icon... I seem to be missing a lot of the fun :)

Re:Younger people ?

[leonmergen]

Linux users are doing just fine, and the last thing we need is for Linux to be more like Windows.

Excuse me, but that's just plain ignorance. I know of a hell lot of people who really hate windows and would love to switch over to Linux, but it's the little things like these that hold them back. They try to use all kind of thingies over MSN with me, including webcam conversations, but it simply doesn't work for them. Then they're like "oh, yeah, Linux, right?".... and it's things like that that hold them back. Sure, it's not the only thing, but it's the picture as a whole that we draw about the user experience under Linux... sure, it's nice, fonts are prettier (in the opinions of many), but that just doesn't do it...

Not a very substantial "article"

[AEton]

Summary:
Gosh, I really hate the Windows Messenger 7 UI. It's so ugly. I'm going to say something unsubstantiated about vendor lock-in here and never mention it again, because I want to sound hip to teh Lunix.

Everybody in the entire continent of Europe uses MSN Messenger and most of us just call it -- wait for it -- MSN!

Did you know that Gaim sucks? Look at Firefox and Openoffice.org! Those are much cooler than Gaim. Did you know that ten year olds won't use Gaim because it isn't flashy enough? Lol gaim is so ugly! :( There'll never be Lunix on the desktop!

Kthx.

--Stéphane Rieppi lives in Belgium and is majoring in sociology at the University of Liège. He has a strong passion for Free and Open Source computing and is working on a thesis about Free and Open Source software seen from a sociological viewpoint.

Everything he rails against...

[Godeke]

...is why we use GAIM to communicate in our company. (Well, except the garbage file transfers.) We have a Jabber server that supports encryption and use that for all of our in-house messaging. This is important as we are a geographically distributed team, we need a secure, reliable chat mechanism to collaborate quickly and easily on code. We don't want or need all the garbage that comes with of IMs, and the fact we can link to other services in GAIM makes it our one stop shopping solution for IMs when we *do* need to talk to someone with a more mainsteam IM.

Of course, we are professional developers who don't need to send flash animations, pictures or even more than the basic :) :( smiles. But for a corporate solution, GAIM + Jabber makes a lot of sense and I would hate to see it become the playground that MSN has become.

What about voice ?

[vlad_petric]

And file transfers with non-gaim clients ?

Re:What about voice ?

[gujo-odori]

I think "officially laid to rest" is stronger than the actual situation. The Oct. 7 announcement states that there will be no more gaim-vv releases but that they are working on merging with gaim and code will (not might, but will) be added to gaim.

IMO, that's how it should have been done from the outset.

Veering back toward the the response of so many posters, both here and in the comments for TFA, gaim is pretty good at the basics (better than either AOL's or Yahoo's official clients) and IMO isn't ugly, either. Kopete looks nicer/more Mac-like, but some of its functionality is goofy. I love KDE but use gaim for my IM b/c I just can't stand Kopete.

The trouble is, the basics aren't enough. The main point of TFA, really, is "Where's the voice and webcam support?" This is a major stumbling block in open-source IM, and it doesn't affect just young people. I'm in my early forties and Linux has been my exclusive desktop OS for over five years. My wife is in her thirties and would also be a Linux user except for one thing: Yahoo Messenger, and specifically the voice/video features, is her number one app (ahead of even email) for keeping in touch with her family and friends overseas. Any platform that doesn't support that doesn't work for her, and that's why we have a Win2K box (Yahoo Messenger on Mac doesn't support voice, either, or I'd buy her a Mac).

It's all about the applications for a lot of people, and IM is the only area that immediately comes to mind where there is really a huge gap between capabilities of open-source clients versus proprietary ones. People can point to gaim-vv or to gyach-e (Eeeeeeuuuuuuw! Have you ever looked at the source code for that?! I feel the nausea coming on again just from thinking about it. I and one of my staff members tried for three days to get it to build, without success; eventually I ran a binary RPM through alien), but both of those projects are really in their infancy WRT both functionality and reliability. I've tried both and eventually concluded that I was better off just living without those features until they are more stable (they have cute little tricks like making a 2.5 GHz P4 with a gig or RAM go to 100% CPU utilization and stay there when receiving video. This happened multiple times and my only out was to kill X; charming).

Need a good office suite? OSS has you covered. Browser? Take your pick. The only proprietary browser that's as good as the OSS offerings is Opera, and it also runs on Linux. Email? Same situation? Groupware? Maybe a little rough around the edges, but we're basically there. Security tools? The list is long but distinguished. SQL databases? PostgresQL and MySQL are two of the most popular in the world, take your pick. Development tools? There are probably more OSS tools than proprietary ones available these days, and whether you prefer vi, (X)emacs, or a full-blown IDE, OSS has something for you. This list could go on and on, but I think you all get the point.

However, turn to IM, and OSS is years behind the times. The author of TFA had it right. I know none of us really like hearing that there's something OSS doesn't do as well as proprietary software, and we especially don't like hearing that proprietary is kicking our asses in some area, but sometimes it's true. This is one of those times.

Having a world-class IM, with voice, video, etc., is crucial for OSS at this juncture. I hope people who are working on major OSS IM clients like gaim or Kopete are reading this thread and also read TFA and realize how important this is.

And yes, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. If what is needed is to pay gaim developers to get this done in a reasonable time frame, I will donate 50 bucks, which is more than I've spent on software in years. I hope everyone else who wants advanced voice and video features in OSS IM will also be willing to pony up whatever they can afford to get the job done.

OSnews strikes again.

[labratuk]

I thought "Funny. I haven't seen much inflammatory bullshit recently. I wonder if OSnews have got back into gear again."

Then I noticed the link. Brilliant.

Not a problem with gaim there

[Andy Dodd]

Sounds like whoever packages gaim for your distro is a moron. gaim's developers can't be faulted because someone else is screwing up the packaging.

I've never had any problem with upgrades or installations of gaim on any of my systems (Gentoo, and I used to use RedHat until 7.3), including the Windows port.

gaim blows away AOL's standard AIM client in terms of UI cleanliness, ease of use, and features. How the hell is it that the AIM protocol supports aliases for screen names (i.e. foobar43289342 displays as "John Smith") but only third-party clients actually support it? (i.e. aliases ARE saved on AOL's server with your buddy lists, but AOL's AIM client is about the only client out there that DOESN'T show them).

gaim also lets me strip out all color/fontsize changes from people's IMs. Some people have REALLY annoying color defaults.

gaim starts far faster than AIM.

There is one thing (and only one) that AIM handles better than gAIM, and that's when people use nonstandard character sets in away messages. gAIM bitches about a buggy client, AIM will display the away message, even though some characters will look like junk. I only see these away messages once or twice a month though.

I loved that quote "we call it 'MSN'"

[Rob the Bold]

we usually call it MSN for short here

When I was in high school, while discussing music with a foreign exchange student, she announced: "In France, we call Bruce Springsteen 'The Boss'".

Re:Standardized

[tehshen]

Gaim is just trying to follow the look of the rest of the linux desktop experience.. antiquated and generally pretty ugly!

Of course it's trying to look like the rest of the linux desktop, it uses the same widget set! Sure, you can use one of the High Contrast themes or Simple or somesuch, and Gaim is going to look ugly that way because that's what you've chosen it to look like.

Completely different widget sets (MSN Messenger, WMP, Office, usual win32) on the screen at the same time? That is ugly.

Gaim...

[MsGeek]

...will also get you onto Google Talk, which is basically Google's Jabber server.

It won't do voice chat, but at least you can do IM chat. This is better than the iChat which comes with Mac OS X Panther, which can only do either AIM or .MAC chat and not Jabber. Yes, the Tiger version adds Jabber functionality, but my clamshell iBook can't run Tiger. (The cutoff is native Firewire which the first version of the iBook didn't have.)

Gaim's good on both Linux *and* Windows. The Windows port is solid. And it's Free Software.

The article misses the point

[Remillard]

After RTFA, I think the author is missing the point of instant messaging. Strangely enough, it's right there in the name:

Instant: adj.

      1. Occurring at once; immediate:

Messaging: tr,

      1. To send a message to.

It's not instant video chatting, instant flash advertisements, instant voice communications. They are messages. At this Gaim and Kopete work very well indeed. I don't even use the standard MSN, Yahoo, and AIM clients on my WinXP box. It's Gaim and it does everything at once. As far as aesthetics go, Gaim is about as lovely as anything else. Kopete looks as great as you can make KDE look (which is pretty damn good.) In fact, I occasionally turn on the color cycling plugin on Kopete and get lots of positive comments and folks wish they could do that with their clients (just move to Linux!).

The only spot where I think the author is possibly on-topic is file transfers. More often than not though, this is a function of network firewalls and port forwarding. If there was a mode where Gaim/Kopete could self discover an outside IP address and use UPnP port requests, then I'm sure it'd work phenomenally in our household.

Adium X

[ChrisF79]

I'm a mac user and I love Adium X and would love to see it get ported to Linux. It's such an easy program to customize, very nice interface, and absolutely free. Just seems like a great fit for Linux in my opinion.

A Lame Gaim Claim

[digitaldc]

"Their interfaces are terrible. Moreover, all you can do with them is write basic IMs."
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaim
Features:

• Tabbed message windows for easy switching of conversations Accounts option allows user to log on as many different accounts at once as desired

• Transparency support via a plugin for conversation and buddy list windows (only under Microsoft Windows)

• Aliasing nicknames by real name of user

• Grouping different buddies that are really the same person into a "contact" [2]

• Logging conversations and messages supported [3]

• Buddy Pounce feature pops up notifications or plays a sound when a user changes status [4]

Plugins:
Gaim supports plugins for RSA and GPG encryption, as well as Off-the-record messaging.

See GAIM plugins: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/plugins.php/
More info about GAIM: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=GAIM

Editors? Editors???!!

[Eil]

From TFA:

What happens when the corporation anybody seems to love to hate, namely Microsoft, release a killer app and of makes it free (as in dollars), but, of course, keeps its source jealously closed? And worse than that, use it to maintain a strong lock-in to the Windows platform?

OSNews: We don't need no stinkin' editors!