----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Catanzaro" <mcatanzaro(a)gnome.org>
To: desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
Sent: Monday, January 4, 2016 4:40:55 PM
Subject: Re: Proposed default app changes for F24
On Sun, 2016-01-03 at 20:38 -0800, Luya Tshimbalanga wrote:
> How about Pidgin? Running several chat like Viber, IMO, and other
> WebRTC
> would be nice to integrate in the desktop. Shame that Empathy
> development is inactive. Hopefully someone will step up to maintain
> it
> upstream.
I have two thoughts on this:
* I very strongly believe we should not consider GTK+ 2 apps. Pidgin
looks worse than Empathy.
Pidgin has one big advantage over Empathy: you can make a single-window app of it, it
improves usability in GNOME a lot. I've packaged the plugin and it's currently
going through the review, but it's not supported by Pidgin directly and I don't
think it's something we should pre-install.
* I frankly don't think we need to have a chat app installed by
default. I expect most users would never open Pidgin.
I agree. On the other hand, if we should ever have an IM client pre-installed it should be
Pidgin. That's the only Linux client that is alive. I was pretty surprised how
communities of some Pidgin plugins are alive. For example the telegram-purple has a
community of several dozen active people and several developers, that's more than the
whole Empathy client and there are dozens of plugins for Pidgin. So the community and user
base is still there. If I'm not mistaken they're also working on a GTK-3 port.
Jiri