I use Linux. Probably no surprise there. I also use IMs. However, I'm Hungarian, and currently in a community of more-or-less complete tech illiterate people. No offense meant: without them, there wouldn't be even a slight chance of getting a job in IT. Anyway, these friends of mine use *shudder* MSN - or Windows Live Messenger, as it likes being called lately. So, I needed an MSN client on Linux.
My criteria (in order of descending importance):- It must work
- It must allow grouping contacts in the contact list
- It must support tabbed chat windows
- It should be reasonably fast
- It should handle MSN Live! colored nicks (preferably color the nicks, optionally just remove the tags)
- Showing music I'm listening to is nice.
The two main competitors are aMSN and Pidgin. Other clients of note are MSN Web Messenger, meebo (both web-based) and some clients using the same backend as Pidgin - see here.
aMSN
The aMSN project aims to build an MSN clone for Linux, and is making quite good progress. I've used it for quite a while, even hacked up an (80% functional) script to fetch current song info from Banshee 1. All in all it's a mature project. My main problems are temporary hangups and that it's generally slow. Also, written in TCL/TK, it doesn't integrate nicely with the desktop.
Pidgin
Pidgin is a modular, multi-protocol IM client. As such, it's main focus isn't MSN, but support for it is quite complete, especially from 2.5 on. There's a forked MSN protocol backend at Google Code called msn-pecan. I haven't tried it myself. My main issue here is that I can't find a way to set my personal message. A little plus is that it integrates nicely with Gnome (I don't know about KDE, I guess it must be OK if the deps are met).
Update 23/02/2009: To set the personal message, just select a status (like available). A text entry widget appears below the status selection combobox. That's where the personal message goes.
Side-by-side
| aMSN | Criteria | Pidgin |
|---|---|---|
| Check | Works | Check |
| Check | Group contacts | Check |
| Check | Tabbed chats | Check |
| Sluggish | Fast | Check |
| With Colored
Nicks plugin Background color not supported |
MSN Live! colored nicks | With Pidgin
Plus! plugin Fails in some cases Gradients not supported |
| With Music plugin | Show current song | Several plugins, music-tracker works fine for me. |
All in all, I find the responsiveness of Pidgin more important than the
feature-completeness of aMSN - and Pidgin's quickly gaining ground in this
aspect as well. Also, Pidgin's written in C, which I'm way more familiar with
than TCL/TK.
YMMV.
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