I'm not usually one to stand in the way of progress, but it seems like
there are grave issues here for people migrating from other OSes.
Migration to Linux from another OS is best done in two stages: first you
keep your old OS and switch to cross-platform apps, then you switch your
OS and keep your apps. Platform-specific defaults break the two-stage
model, requiring users to learn a new app at the same time they're
learning a new OS.
Migraters also can't be expected to just install Pidgin - and that goes
double when their Linux guru is only contactable over IM. We've all
seen newbies go to a program's website and read halfway through the
source code (or worse) before asking for help, and getting rid of Pidgin
is likely to lead to more cases of that.
Finally, two-stage migration takes a long time (a year or two in my
brother's case). Dropping Pidgin from the default install in the space
of a single release effectively throws away all the preparation work
that current migraters have done.
As I say, I don't like standing in the way of progress, but I really
think Empathy would need to be as far ahead of Pidgin as Firefox is
ahead of IE before we could justify the disruption to the migration path.
- Andrew
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