Instant Messaging in Fedora Workstation

[Michael Catanzaro]

Hi Allan!

On Fri, 2015-04-24 at 18:33 +0100, Allan Day wrote:
> This will largely be determined by whatever decisions are made
> upstream in the GNOME project. (Chat is integrated into several key
> GNOME modules - such as the shell and the control center - so it's 
> not
> simply a matter of switching packages around.)

This isn't true: neither control-center nor gnome-shell depends on
Empathy in Fedora 22 (in fact, not a single package on my computer
does). I don't think control-center has anything at all to do with
chat, does it? gnome-shell used to expect Empathy to be installed, but
I believe that changed during 3.15 sometime. So Empathy is really just
an application like any other, and doesn't deserve any special
protection anymore.

gnome-shell used to integrate very well with Empathy, but it's been
getting worse over the years. Since 3.8 or so it stopped setting my
status to Away when I locked my computer, which I felt was a serious
regression. As of 3.16 it has devolved into a mess: notifications of
new messages now only work about half the time rather than always
(definitely a new bug in F22, perhaps in gnome-shell), and buddy
invites often disappear into the void (I think this is a new bug too;
perhaps they just get ignored if my status in Away, since they're
notifications). Frankly, it was much better in F21 than it is in F22.

There are other serious problems with Empathy as well: XMPP or SIP
calls regularly fail with not even an error message, just a blank
screen. In group XMPP calls, it's pure chance whether I can hear all
participants or only one.

I think it's absolutely time to remove Empathy from the default
install. It requires a significant investment of developer manpower to
get it up to an acceptable level of quality for Fedora. Still, I use
it every day, because everything else is worse. :( Polari is IRC-only,
so it's not even attempting to be a replacement (and it's useless for
me; I need Jabber too, and I expect it in the same app). Pidgin looks
horrible and it uses the message tray. I think we should just not
install any chat client, since we have no reasonable replacement, and
let the user decide for himself what to install if one is needed.

Michael