Replacing Pidgin with Empathy in Karmic

I have been checking Karmic for some time and one thing that i found was that they replaced Pidgin with Empathy. Empathy is a new IM developed by GNU based on Telepathy Framework. Its a nice IM, no denying that. Since i read that ubuntu team is going for empathy i tried to switch to it but i never could accept this change.

In my opinion right now pidgin is a little superior. Pidgin may lack multimedia support but it has plugins, nicer interface, yahoo support and some other protocols that empathy doesn’t support. And pidgin is improving its multimedia support as of latest beta which i installed from their PPA, and i think its quite good to see it finally. For a person like me video doesn’t matter much in chats, and for audio i use skype. The only feature that empathy gets me convinced is screen sharing but then again, i rarely need that plus i have coccinella installed for such purposes along with other features such as whiteboard sharing and etc. In the future if empathy gets better i might make a switch for it but i don’t see that happening in the next 4,6 months or so.

Tags: audio, coccinella, empathy, karmic, koala, linux, multimedia, Open Source, pidgin, skype, telepathy, transfer, ubuntu, video