Empathy might be replaced with Pidgin instant messenger

Apr 19, 2015 22:50 GMT  ·  By

We discussed last week the possibility of removal of Empathy, a multi-protocol instant messaging client used by default in the GNOME desktop environment and many popular GNU/Linux operating systems, from the GNOME Project because of lack of development progress.

Today we see the first major distribution of GNU/Linux taking action against the Empathy IM client which, we have to admit, is it not designed for modern times anymore and lacks certain essential features, as Fedora Ambassador and Red Hat employee Jiří Eischmann explains the matter of Instant Messaging in Fedora Workstation in a blog post.

"Instant messaging in Fedora Workstation is suboptimal. The current default IM client – Empathy – doesn’t work very well," says Jiří Eischmann. "It’s an app that was designed for GNOME 2 and is not a good citizen in GNOME 3. [...] Empathy now doesn’t have the status icon and if you close the roster window, it goes offline, so if you want to stay online, you need to have a roster window floating around all the time."

Collabora is no longer interested in developing Empathy

Jiří Eischmann also explains why no one wants the Empathy instant messenger in their Linux kernel-based operating systems, as the original author, Collabora, is no longer interested in developing the application and no other development team wants to adopt it because of its complicated architecture.

Therefore, the only way to fix the instant messaging issue in Fedora Linux is to replace Empathy with another popular open-source IM client, such as Pidgin, or no longer integrate an IM client, as many users now rely on WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger, and other popular chat clients.

The Fedora Linux development team needs to know your thoughts on the Instant Messaging matter. Do you need a dedicated, multi-protocol instant messenger application in Fedora, or not? Drop a comment below or on the original blog post created by Jiří Eischmann.