There’s some reason to believe that Empathy is the next big thing in instant-messaging on the Ubuntu desktop. There have been passionate calls for its adoption in Ubuntu 9.04 as a replacement for Pidgin, and the Gnome people seem to be pushing it (not surprisingly, since it’s developed under their auspices) for future releases–note the big green dot next to Mary Poppins’ name in the conceptualization images of the new Gnome desktop. Give all this hype, I decided to try it for myself.
I should point out that, a short-lived relationship with Kopete notwithstanding, I’ve been a Pidgin devotee since coming to Linux. I used it back when it was still called Gaim, before AOL sued the project for the crime of adopting a name that rhymes with ‘AIM’. In that time, it’s been a reliable, intuitive and extensible instant-messaging client.
Pidgin vs. Empathy
