Empathy

Empathy supports several different protocols such as Jabber and SIP, yet it takes a long time, sometimes minutes, to connect with any account. This is regardless of your internet connection. Although it supports audio and video calls, the feature is unreliable. We couldn’t start any such calls with a contact, using Jabber and SIP accounts. The ability to send files to contacts is another useful feature… that doesn’t work. Empathy doesn’t provide any error messages, but instead remains frozen waiting for response from the intended recipient of the file.

Despite its poor standing in comparison with its peers, if all you’re looking for is a chat client then Empathy just might suffice for you. For each contact, it maintains a complete history, which catalogues all the text chats as well as details about calls made and received.