Content on this page is probably outdated and represents my personal knowledge, feelings and understading of things at that time.
In the hunt for a good WLM (formerly MSN) client, I found & tried many OSS alternatives. Here’s the list of the clients I found and tried, with their pros and cons as I observed them.
aMSN - 0.97
One of the most known MSN/WLM clients out there.
Good things:
+ fairly stable
+ quite good WLM protocol support
+ it’s storing various information that can be usefull (history of avatars the person had, last login/msg etc..)
+ plugins support
Not so good things:
- written in TK/TCL and that by itself is a big handicap
- the interface isn’t pretty and it feels “alien” on the desktop
- doesen’t support unicode fully
- MSG+ plugin abandoned, this is quite usefull when you have bunch of teenage girls in your contact list
- no contact list searching (at least I didn’t found it)
emesene - latest SVN
Emesene is quite new piece of software, written in GTK+ so it blends good with GNOME desktop.
Good things:
+ uses GTK+ so it blends with my desktop neatly
+ some nice GL effects
+ plugins
Not so good things:
- “badly” written code, it blocks the interface way to much
- still in heavy development, so it contains quite some bugs
- MSG+ plugin parses colors badly (read above why I need this)
kopete
A KDE multiprotocol instant messenger.
Good things:
+ Nice intergration with KDE
+ Nice and usefull effects (smooth scrolling etc..)
+ Quite good MSN protocol support
Not so good things:
- It depends heavly on KDE libs, so “purists” like me don’t use it
pidgin - 2.3.1 (a bit old yeah)
Multi IM client I gave a shot quite some time ago.
Good things:
+ Supports more protocols, so you can escape the MSN madness :P
+ Nice gui
Not so good things:
- Bad, and I mean really bad MSN protocol support, there’re some efforts to correct this tho
- So basicly, everything related to MSN protocol
I wouldn’t use this one for MSN only.
There’re some other clients worth mentioning but not using at the moment - because the development is still heavy.
- elloquence
It uses pymsn as a backend and GTK+ for a really neat frontend that’ll have some kopete like effects.
- Open Live Messenger
It was a really promising client, but the developer decided to discontinue the development due lack of time. I’m really sorry for this one - as it looked really promising. There should still be code somewhere in google code hosting, but I won’t link to it.
So that are my personal experiances with above clients, which one do you use? did I forget something?