Ok noted and like I said I will leave this open for others to chip in. Unless the decision affected multiple users, I still prefer not to install it by default. In that scenario, just remember that "zypper in pidgin" will bring it back. Cheers, Maurizio Galli (MauG) Xfce Team https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Xfce On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 7:52 PM Liam Proven <lproven@suse.cz> wrote:
Your quoting seems to be badly broken. I suggest you look into that, too.
It is not Gmail's fault; I use Gmail at home and it bottom-posts just fine. Here is how: 1. Select "plain text" (bottom right, 3 vertical dots next to trashcan). 2. Enter the edit window, hit Ctrl-A to select all, then trim and reply.
I have attempted to correct your quoting below. Please forgive me if I got it wrong.
On 2/25/19 12:11 PM, Maurizio Galli wrote:
Hi Liam,I don't consider Pidgin to be obsolete. Rather not particularly good with the more modern technologies.
It works with them very well, so I am sorry but I think you are not working from correct, current knowledge. Thus I disagree with your decision, because it is based on defective information.
Telegram works fine in Pidgin and I use it daily
I personally had bad experience with the plugin, particularly with "groups" and it doesn't really compare to the official native Telegram app in the repo.
[1]
The question is not whether there is a native client, or whether it is better or not.
E.g. Telegram has a client, but FB Messenger does not.
Some services have Web clients (e.g. Whatsapp, Skype) but that means leaving a browser tab open, consuming lots of RAM, easy to accidentally close).
Some have a native app, but these are often undesirable:
Many "native clients" such as Rocket.chat or Slack are not true native clients; they are just frames around an Electron window, meaning that they embed one copy of Google Chrome per instance. The result is that each window takes in the region of half a gig of RAM.
The point is that Pidgin _replaces_ multiple native clients with a single, integrated app, with a single point of notifications, a single unified interface, etc.
Pidgin is this more in the Unix spirit of small, efficient tools that can handle anything, rather than big, complex single-purpose apps.
[2]
As for Telegram, it works perfectly. I can add individuals or groups to my buddy list, I can message individuals or groups or get messages from them. I can see emoticons and so on.
My copy of Pidgin is also connected to IRC, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts and Rocket.chat
It's not a great IRC client imo missing many of the features of hexchat or weechat.
I don't care. I don't want rich features and chrome. I want something simple, clean and efficient, that integrates multiple messenging services in one app.
This is why I use Xfce.
I also use Thunderbird, which again talks to all my email accounts in 1 place. It would be very messy and difficult to handle my email if I had to run 6 different email apps, all with different quoting conventions. (Like the official SUSE GroupWise client, which can talk to nothing else, for example.)
It would *impossible* if they took a gig of RAM each.
I thought that google chat and Facebook chat plugins were deprecated when the XMPP their support was dropped.
Google Hangouts works with the standard built-in XMPP protocol. I use the web client for audio/video calls and group chats.
Please let me know if new plugins exist because they are not in the default install of Pidgin.
Facebook needs a plugin:
https://software.opensuse.org/package/pidgin-facebookchat
Telegram needs a plugin:
https://software.opensuse.org/package/pidgin-plugin-telegram
With these, both work perfectly and better than standalone apps or web pages. The clients are tiny, efficient and do all that I need in a few hundred kB of RAM instead of a few hundred MB.
Yes, Electron-based clients really *are* that inefficient. A thousand times more memory usage is *normal*. I am not exaggerating here.
I did not know that it supported Rocket chat.
https://software.opensuse.org/package/pidgin-plugin-rocketchat
Rocket.chat is the official internal SUSE channel for the documentation team and several other products and projects.
Is Pidgin the only tool to use that service (I'm not a SUSE employee)?
It is the *only* 3rd party client for Rocket.chat that I am aware of. There is a native client, but it is a huge memory hog, and it is only available for Fedora (although the package does work on Tumbleweed) or as a Flatpak, which I was unable to get to work.
I request reconsideration of this, especially if it is to be replaced with a more limited, single-protocol client such as Hexchat.
I submit that replacing Pidgin with Hexchat is like replacing a Swiss Army Knife with a single small Philips screwdriver. The screwdriver may be better at one thing, but the knife can do 42 different things acceptably well.
I can leave this open to discussion of course, here and Factory ML.
I am no longer on the Factory ML and am not planning to rejoin. My contributions were unwelcome.
-- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084
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