As we are actively developing Foresight 2, it might be a good time to look for a new default messenger. Pidgin has been good for us and sort of the defacto standard for linux desktops. However, I am very interested in the future and where messaging is going. Telepathy, calling themselves a “Flexible Communications Framework”, is very interesting. The idea of a common framework for accessing a variety of communications services is very appealing. Not only can this be used for messaging and presence information, but now other desktop applications could potential tap into that framework very easily, via dbus. The possibilities are very cool!
A number of the pieces are packaged up for the Foresight 2 alphas, including Empathy and Banter clients.
I am looking for feedback, should Foresight Linux 2 default to using telepathy for messaging, not shipping pidgin by default? Let me know what you think!
I really like the telepathy idea, hope it is usable enough for everyday at this time.
I’m happily using Empathy for all my protocols (msn and aim thanks to the libpurple based haze telepathy element).
It still needs work but it has served me well for a long time. I’m fairly interested in Banter but development seems to have stalled currently.
I’m too very excited about telepathy. I don’t know if it’s ready to be default.
But Foresight is about the latest and greatest of the GNOME Desktop Environment and Freedesktop.org, so why not? 🙂
Empathy is cool and rocks hard.
But for happy customers you would need telepathy-haze and therefore libpurple anyway.
So which one has the better UI and is better integrated?
I would say +1 for empathy (especially when looking at future plug-ins etc.)
Most users will expect Gaim/Pidgin to be there.
I’d vote to default to Telepathy/Empathy (because it is *Foresight* Linux), but keep Pidgin around (or make it *very obvious* in the documentation on how to install pidgin)
No doubt pidgin will remain in the repo, easy to install.
I would keep Pidgin as the default but include Telepathy + Empathy for early adopters. Empathy and the rest of the Telepathy stack still represent a pretty significant regression in features compared to Pidgin, though it depends on the connection manager (telepathy-haze, last I checked, couldn’t do simple things like set buddy icons). Later, when the underlying Telepathy layers flesh out a bit and when Empathy becomes better-integrated, switch to using that by default.
Empathy and telepathy are great projects. And they really need an inclusion by default in a distribution such as foresight. Empathy is starting to get stable and usable, has a good UI that respects as much as possible the Gnome’s HIG, it can only get better by being included in Foresight.
And the constant upgrade process of foresight is great for young projects.
My opinion is that telepathy and empathy would benefit a lot of Foresight and they are projects that diserves to be helped.
Go for Empathy!
I agree completly with Boke, he has writen exactly the answer i wanted to write.
Thanks Boke for this comment.
Thanks Ken for your Gnome packaging 🙂