about empathy as the default IM application

[Ken VanDine]

Personally I don't see anything about empathy that is worse than pidgin.
Empathy has the plus of being extremely well integrated into GNOME and
the telepathy framework opens up such huge potential.  Sticking with
Pidgin keeps us locked in the corner, we could be so much cooler if we
can get out of that corner.  I agree there are a few addons for pidgin
that some users depend on, that aren't available for empathy.  But the
default empathy has all the features most of our target users need.  If
you really need OTR, you can install pidgin.  Same for any of the other
plugins that you might actually need, but the 95% case doesn't need
those.  

I also suspect with the commitment to empathy in karmic, someone will
step up and work on those more useful plugins.

Also remember empathy is still early in the 2.28 dev cycle, you have to
envision what it will be at the end of 2.28.

Just my $0.02,
--Ken

On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 16:04 -0400, Asif Youssuff wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-06-16 at 20:39 +0100, Alexander H Deriziotis wrote:
> > This would be a pretty bad move regarding Ubuntu's development model.
> > With a 6-month release cycle, things need to remain cutting edge. If
> > every release is just going to be a rehash of a previous one, then
> > Canonical should be releasing at least yearly.
> 
> Yes, a rehash is so much worse than releasing stuff that is *worse* than
> what came before. Obviously I disagree -- I think that there is a real
> problem with the idea that "newer is better" -- I believe that better is
> better -- and sometimes that means it's newer, and sometimes that means
> waiting until the newer item is actually better. 
> 
> Ubuntu shouldn't be focused on being newer, it should be focused on
> being better -- if it's not better, bug #1 doesn't /deserve/ to be
> closed. 
> 
> -Asif
> 
>