Ease of installation
Are they newbie friendly?
Linux distributions come in many shapes and sizes. Most also differ in their underlying package management systems. This is why it’s difficult to find projects that provide installable binaries for all the different distributions. Most users, especially newbies, find it convenient to install packages from the software repositories of their distro.
Despite being one of the oldest projects in our list, Empathy is still the default IM client on many popular distributions and is featured in the software repositories of most other popular desktop distributions.
Just as easy to install is Jitsi, which provides deb and rpm packages for stable and bleeding-edge nightly builds. It also provides repositories for distros such as Debian and Ubuntu and an rpm repository for Fedora, Mageia and others. You can use these repositories to keep your installation updated.
Apart from installable binaries for Debian 9 and the past three releases each of Fedora and Ubuntu, GNU Ring also provides generic rpm and deb packages for use on distros such as Mageia. You can also use these generic binaries on derivative distros or on the LTS releases.
The lightweight uTox doesn’t offer installable binaries for any Linux distribution. Apart from Arch Linux, where uTox is featured in the AUR, all other Linux users must download the source from the GitHub repository and manually compile the tool, after ensuring all the dependencies are available. Thankfully, the project does provide an alternate solution. You can download the precompiled binary which gives you a running instance of uTox with just a double-click and doesn’t require any installation.
Installing OpenMeetings is not for the faint hearted. Not only does the project not provide installable packages, the installation requires users to fetch many dependencies and manually compile essential components such as ffmpeg. You also have to set up and configure a database. Then you still have to run through the web-based installer that finally enables you to create a user account! For OpenMeetings, compiling ffmpeg alone can take as much as 30 minutes, and so the entire process makes the project unsuitable for most new Linux users.