Good IM Program?

[Poppa_Meth]

I don't do a great deal of IMing but I've had Yahoo IM on my PC for a long time now and mainly use it to talk to my girlfriend. It's getting pretty bloated now days though and I'm looking for something better. I have no idea where to start though. I've heard of several including Miranda, Trillian, Gaim, and so on but having a hard time deciding. I may be setting up a laptop in the near future with Ubuntu on it as well so that is a consideration to keep in mind. I know it natively has Gaim installed. My only other main requirement is that it fully support MSN as well since my girlfriend uses that quite a bit as well. IRC wouldn't be bad to have either. Thanks for any input.

[Ai Haibara]

Personally, for a multi-IM-service client, I use Gaim/Pidgin (due to a resolved and long-running conflict with AOL, it's now called 'Pidgin' as of version 2.0.0 (or really, 2.0.0 beta 7). The main webpage can be found at http://www.pidgin.im .) Note, however, if you want to use Gaim/Pidgin to connect to MSN, you have to have at least version 2.0.0 beta 3.1 or higher of Gaim (unless you can find the patched libmsn.dlls for the earlier versions, but that's a hassle).

I haven't tried Trillian, so I can't comment on it, but I have tried Miranda, and it was mediocre - admittedly, I was trying it on a Win98 tower. I couldn't get it to accept and use my MSN buddy icon properly, however, and other things were acting weird. Gaim/Pidgin works just fine on my 98 and XP systems, though.

Most of the clients support the original part of the MSN protocol(s) well enough, but newer things like the Now Playing/personal messages, winks and custom smileys may not be supported (yet). Some of that is still pending in Gaim/Pidgin (and probably Trillian, since the developers of both clients supposedly know/help each other).

[Poppa_Meth]

Thanks for the input on it. I'm not too worried about the bloated stuff that it doesn't support yet. I'm mainly in need on IM and possibly file transfer. I don't talk in smilies anyway.

[rallynavvie]

I've been using Trillian for years with no issues. The only thing I don't like about it is how it handles GoogleTalk. You have to buy the Pro version and install a plugin, but even then it crashes sometimes. Hopefully a new release or update will fix it. The one plus to the Pro version is it also supports the video chat so I use it to videoconference for work and to keep in touch with friends overseas.

However if you're planning on switching to a Linux distro then you may want to use GAIM (or whatever it's called now) since it has stable builds for UNIX platforms.

I'm waiting for Astra to come out, the next version of Trillian. It looks to integrate a lot more services into its client.

[Poppa_Meth]

Went with Pidgin(GAIM) for now. I may try Trillian again in the future. I've tried it in the past and it seemed good, but a bit on the bloated side. No where near what YIM is though.

[ViRaL1]

Not to down Trillian as every IM client likely has security flaws, but there was one that came up earlier this month...

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=184

[Poppa_Meth]

So far I've had a lot of crashes with Pidgin. I can't get it to open at all right now.

[Ai Haibara]

Any specific error messages, or just the standard "(program) has encountered an error and needs to close"-type of message? Did it work okay at first and start crashing on later runs?

Did you install GTK+? (though it's not easy at the moment to get one of the 'no-gtk' builds, as you have to know where the old Gaim project files are located on Sourceforge)

Did you install Pidgin over a previous version of Gaim, or already had GTK+ installed on the system (for any other program, including GIMP, Sylpheed, etc.)?

Did you have any third-party plugins installed? Primarily, the only problems I've really ever had running Gaim (under XP or 98 ) were usually with third-party plugins, especially when Gaim was updated.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the new version of Pidgin might have problems even if it's a new install on a system that's never had Gaim or any GTK+ program installed on it, before. I think I've seen some posts on the Gaim Sourceforge project forums where one or two people - new users - were having crashing problems that sound like this.

[Poppa_Meth]

I didn't have any previous install of an IM on this system except YIM. I didn't have GTK either. The Pidgin installer has its own version of GTK with it and worked fine the day I installed it. The next day it crashed repeatedly upon trying to start it. Always gave me a program must close message as soon as it appeared in the system tray. It always said something about purplelib.dll I believe. I tried completely uninstalling it and using the GTK installer for the Gimp first and then installing Pidgin over it. It updated the GTK components but still had the same error message. I have it installed at work on a machine that already had GTK and it's doing fine with the same configuration there.

[ricardouk]

MEEBO
www.meebo.com

why install anything? web 2.0

[Ai Haibara]

What version of Windows is that system using? (The only reason I ask, is because Win98/ME can only use up to a certain version of GTK+. If it's the same system mentioned in your Computer Details, ignore this. )

It's times like this I wish Gaim/Pidgin had more of an actual support forum. I'm not sure what else could be causing it to suddenly start crashing left and right when it was initially working fine - did you install anything else, afterward? Have you tried rebooting the system?

The Pidgin FAQ only basically tells you to download the debug version of Pidgin, and file a bug report (if one doesn't already exist). http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/Using%20Pidgin#WhatshouldIdoifPidginCrashes

[Poppa_Meth]

Home system in XP Home. Work is XP Pro.

Nothing else installed. No problems until after reboot.