empathy - is it for real?

[Dan Irwin]

Hi list,

This is a bit of a rant about empathy.

This has to be the buggiest, least user friendly application on
Fedora. And we choose it as our default IM client. Why?

I did a quick scan of the list, and I don't see much traffic about
empathy. Surely It's not just me.

Over several successive versions (Since Fedora 10), empathy has never
"just worked" or "worked right" on my laptop. It will crash. Modules
will crash. People will complain that I am signed in and ignoring
them, when I don't appear to have empathy even running. While I have
persisted with it, empathy seems exceptionally bad in Fedora 16.

I have now removed all accounts from empathy, and gone back to pidgin.
Result? IM which works, behaves, and seems sane.

I think the concept of empathy/telepathy is great. The implementation
is about as far from great as one could get.

Surely I am not the only one who has these experiences and thoughts.

Thanks for reading.

Regards,

Dan