Catch the Pidgin!

Having switched to using Linux for the majority of my basic communications activities I'm now using the successor of Gaim for instant messenging. Due to a deal with AOL they switched the name from "Gaim" to "Pidgin" and they have adopted a cute little pigeon logo reminiscent of the "Catch the pigeon" cartoon.

Pidgin supports text chat on Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google (via Jabber XMPP) and more - everything I need except Skype which I often end up doing text chat on because I don't have a microphone handy. I'm not sure why Skype can't adopt the open standard of XMPP or play nice with universal chat apps like Pidgin, that's too bad.

I'm happy to be able to get all my chat apps boiled down to one - its less resources used, fewer updates to track, etc. etc.

One warning: the 2.0.0 release of Pidgin seems to have a bad bug that means a new user will not be able to add a Yahoo account - it will crash. Other IM accounts work fine, and those who used previous Gaim based releases will be okay. At fix in 2.0.1 is promised to be out soon, unfortunately that's a big bug to have slipped through on the major 2.0.0 release and debut of Pidgin, I wonder how that happened?