Last time I spoke about Empathy, I was a little disappointed in the project.  I really liked Pidgin and it felt like they were being stabbed in the back, even if everything the Empathy team was doing was koser GPL-wise.  At the time I didn’t give it a second look because it was still missing a bunch of features.  It’s been 2 years, or 4 releases of Gnome, since then and the project has come a long way.  It now supports all the protocols that Pidgin does (and more) and everyone seemed to think it was doing a better job of listening to users, etc.  Now, this shouldn’t make a huge difference unless I missed something, but I’m reviewing 2.30 as Fedora 14 hasn’t come out yet.  I’m sure there wasn’t a massive upgrade or anything.  So, first of all, here’s what Pidgin looks like.

Well, the latest craze to hit the Linux bloggers is talking about Empathy.  Everyone is talking about it.  It’s apparently going to be in the next version of Gnome and Ubuntu is considering replacing Pidgin with Empathy for the next release.  First of all, depending on how much work is done on Empathy between now and then, I think this may be a bad idea.  Ubuntu is the distro we give our Linux n00b friends to play with.  Pidgin can do (more or less) everything Trillian can do (and definitely everything AIM can do - except voice/vid).  Do we want them thinking that Linux is crap because they are using the feature incomplete Empathy?