Listed on the roadmap to Gnome 2.24 is the integration with Empathy, a multi-protocol IM client. This integration could be a sign of a replacement for Pidgin and Ekiga with one single SIP and multi-protocol IM application.

For this article I tested Empathy to see how it works and if it is better or worse then Pidgin (currently my favorite IM client).

My options are not as vast as Pidgin but I was able to find the main IM protocols like AIM, MSN, GTalk, Yahoo! The added bonus was that I could also add SIP accounts.

After all of the accounts were added, the UI looked very much similar to Pidgin’s.

I ran into some problems connecting to a couple of my accounts. Empathy kept asking to access the Keyring default password, which I had long forgotten. But, after troubleshooting that everything worked well. I’m not sure if this was something I did or some bug in the program.

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