Instant Messaging Solutions for Linux

Sim-IM

Sim-IM (Simple Instant Messenger) is multi-protocol instant messaging application based on Qt library. It’s available for Linux, Windows and MacOS. Initially it (with the name of SIM-ICQ) was developed by Vladimir Shutoff who left the project; some time later a new development group was formed and the project was reborn with the name of Sim-IM.

Here is the list of the protocols supported by Sim-IM:

• Oscar
• Jabber
• LiveJournal
• .NET Messenger Service (previously known as MSN)
• Yahoo!

Sim-IM has all the basic features you may need including: file transfers, sending contact lists, URL sending and etc. Unfortunately it does not support audio and video conferencing, however it has a lot of different plugins which significantly increase its functionality. The most important and useful plugins are: proxy support (SOCKS4, SOCKS5, HTTPS, HTTP), weather, text replacing (in the message edit window), AutoAway, filtering, GPG encryption and etc.

The problem is that at the moment, according to official website, the development of Sim-IM has got stuck because most of the developers have left the project. Thus there is a probability that all the current bugs will remain to be unfixed.

Gajim

Gajim represents an instant messaging client for the XMPP protocol which uses the GTK+ toolkit. It runs on Linux, Windows and BSD. As it’s stated on the official website the main goal of Gajim is “to provide a full featured and easy to use Jabber client”.

Frankly speaking it’s hardly possible to imagine more user-friendly and easier to use client. It’s very intuitive and nice looking application. As far as the features are concerned though it already has a lot of useful features, still there is something that need to be added, such as audio and video conferencing. The great thing is that developers are working on it and a preview is already available, so the users will be able to try those features pretty soon.

Here is the list which includes the main features of Gajim:

• File transfer, Room Bookmarks
• Trayicon, Speller, extended chat history functionalities
• TLS, GPG and End-To-End encryption support (with SSL legacy support)
• Wikipedia, dictionary and search engine lookup
• Tabbed chat window and single window modes
• Group chat support (with MUC protocol), invitation, chat to group chat transformation, minimize group chat to roster
• Emoticons, Avatars, PEP (user activity, mood and tune)
• Multiple accounts support
• XML Console
• Multilingual support (24 languages, including: English, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Russian and Italian)

Unfortunately the client itself does not support other protocol at the moment. Still you can try to setup them via transport, but you need to remember that not all the servers support transport.