Poll Results: Best Linux Instant Messaging Client

This week you voted for: The Best Linux Instant Messaging Client

This time there were less votes than usual, one factor being probably the fact that some Linux users are undecided when it comes to IM clients:

I can't wait to see the results at this poll. I sooo hate pidgin and I'm sooo looking forward to find a very good alternative :D!

or:

I am holding on my vote, in a dilemma between pidgin and empathy. I use empathy at work and pidgin at home! And I love them both ;)

The poll results

And now to answer yet another dilemma we talked about last week:

There was a great debate when Pidgin was replaced with Empathy in Ubuntu and it will be interesting to see if Ubuntu users actually started using Empathy or they are still using Pidgin.

Well, it seems a lot of people started using Empathy, but Pidgin still rules them all:

(click to enlarge)

As you can see, even though Empathy is now default in Ubuntu (and most WebUpd8 readers use Ubuntu), Pidgin is still used by 59% of WebUpd8 readers and even though Empathy came second, it only got 13% of votes.

This week we got a lot of "Other answer" votes, the most notable being: qutIM (13), Gajim (12 votes), aMSN (12), PSI (8), Kmess (5) and the rest got less then 5 votes.

Now, considering that last week VLC won by a large margin the best Linux movie player poll and now Pidgin the best Linux IM client by a large margin also, it makes you wonder what are the criteria for picking a default application for Linux distributions since neither VLC or Pidgin are default in Ubuntu (and other distributions).


Last but not least, I would like to thank you once again for voting on our weekly poll series. The next poll should come sometime tomorrow.