After a lot of testing and working with the Fedora packagers I am now happy to say that the current version of Empathy in Fedora is ready for wider use. Just be sure to install the telepathy-haze-mission-control and telepathy-haze packages in addition to Empathy to get access to all the major chat protocols. With these packages I have been able to retire Pidgin from use on my system and take the bold step into the future of instant messaging. The VoIP and video conferencing also works, although due to needing a newer version of gstreamer speex support than currently shipping (will be in the next release of ‘gst-plugins-good’) you might get ‘Darth Vader’ voice when speaking.
There is still a little polish and love that Empathy needs, like supporting file transfer with the various protocols, but I think that for many Fedora users it should already support enough features to be ready for primetime. And you get to taste the new world of easy to use VoIP over Jabber/Google Talk :) So do a quick ‘yum install empathy elepathy-haze-mission-control telepathy-haze’ and you are set to go!
Does it have file transfer yet? There was a patch waiting for review for ages. I can’t do without file transfer, otherwise I’d also switch as soon as possible. Not that Pidgin is anything to count on in that department, I have to use aMsn which is a true shame.
An updated version of gst-plugins-good, should be pushed fairly soon to the testing repo. http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=53251