Linux IM Clients

Haha, in the Netherlands MSN is so big as well. Almost everyone I know uses MSN. I'm really surprised it's not that big in the U.S.

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 at 18:44:03 GMT Link

Yep it's the absolute #1 in both the netherlands and belgium, and I can imagine also in other surrounding european countries

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 at 19:00:07 GMT Link

ICQ is my personal biggest list for work, but of friends living in England, I don't know of anyone who uses anything but MSN. Its without a doubt the most popular.

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 at 19:45:25 GMT Link

I agree with the other two, MSN and ICQ are the most common IM Networks in Europe, both AIM and YahooIM are almost not used around here.

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 at 19:46:33 GMT Link

Speaking of linux IM clients, KDE's Konversation is the nicest I have found - GAIM is clunky, and many of the other available options are just plain broken.

I've never had a MSN account, because I have already been asked by colleagues to create Y!, AIM, ICQ, Skype, and Jabber accounts. No more, and I mean it! ;-)

Actually wish Jabber had taken over, as it is the only open standard of the bunch. But it is poorly implemented, or not implemented at all in most major clients, and on the windows platform, fuhgeddaboudit! *sniff*

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 at 19:58:20 GMT Link

When talking with Admins and players of the game I contribute to (BlackNova Traders), I've noticed that the old-hands with plenty of computer knowledge use AIM or ICQ. Everyone else seems to use MSN.

I made a staunch NO-MSN policy for my list a few months back, and started asking people for alternate contacts. Lo and behold, I only ended up with five people (out of over 300) that had no equivalents - all of them moderators on devnetwork.net.

MSN is definitely big, but multi-protocol users are making any particular network a thing of the past. Which might be why MSN is talking with Yahoo about combining their protocols and namespaces..

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 at 20:25:21 GMT Link

Well I live in South Africa and all the people I chat with either use MSN or Skype. The rest aren't even in the picture and before Skype came along it was just MSN. So, yes, its quite big here.

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 at 20:49:19 GMT Link

MSN all the way in Norway, had a few friends using AIM back in 1999/2000, but haven't used it since. All the kids use MSN.

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 at 21:30:27 GMT Link

When I was in India, everyone used MSN. If not MSN, it was ICQ/Yahoo. No one, literally no one I knew used AOL.

After I moved to US, I found that people use AOL a lot. That surprised me because I hate AOL's client! It's yucky!

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 at 22:22:35 GMT Link

I'm from Spain, and here EVERYBODY uses MSN. Well... sudamerican people uses Yahoo to conversate with their family. But... spanish native people all uses MSN.

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 at 22:55:27 GMT Link

I use Kopete as a client, which is also part of KDE (I'll have to take a look at Konversation, never heard about it). I use it for ICQ and IRC, which are the two only protocols I use. It's a good simple client supporting all protocols. The only reason I use it over Gaim is the KDE integration. I don't know if it changed, but when you open gaim from a shell and you get it to crash, it tells you crashing is normal. It really is the best error handling out there.

Everyone I know uses MSN, but I prefer picking up the phone when I really need to talk to them.

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 at 00:47:33 GMT Link

MSN is indeed big in the netherlands. It started with the teenagers, but has since been spreading like the virus that is Microsoft for some reason. It's even been taking over geeks/IT-people, who should know better ;)

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 at 06:49:35 GMT Link

Well Chris, since there is no comment about Portugal, let me tell you (and this should not be a surprise for you at this point) that in Portugal all my no IT friends use MSN, and also my IT friends! So, beside from one or two Microsoft enemies all the rest use MSN.

BTW: your blog rules!

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 at 08:35:39 GMT Link

Chris, have you tried Trillian Pro instead of the free version? I find it to be excellent and a lot more attractive than the free version.

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 at 21:56:10 GMT Link

Switzerland is a MSN-Country too, although i have a few ICQ-Buddies (mostly geeks ^^) as well (back from the days when icq was the only IM beside aim) - but most of them got msn too...

Fri, 14 Oct 2005 at 11:16:48 GMT Link

Philippines is a YIM-country... Most kids, geeks, students use it.. Though I have MSN and ICQ... I use it for my freelance PHP work.. Surprisely their are form Europian countries.

Mabuhay! :)

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 at 12:29:08 GMT Link

I (and most of the people I know) use AIM. I can't imagine that _America_ Online would be too popular anywhere other than the US.

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 at 20:31:20 GMT Link

Well it time to wake up and smell the coffee...The EU which resides more than 460 million people is almost totally MSN land. Almost twice as big as AIM in the states. Only me and my two friends are using iChat/AIM... but as someone said MSN is really the kids choice and they are the future...

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 at 10:27:45 GMT Link

Well from Australia I can say that anybody that is old school network and IT knowledged has an ICQ number. (We often compare how low our icq#'s are) otherwise everybody out here uses MSN. It's not hard to work out, it comes with windows XP out of the box and annoys the pants off any techie that I know of. I am currently using Adium on my mac and have about 10 accounts set up. ICQ/MSN/Jabber/Yahoo. I use Gaim or centericq on my desktop (I love CLI's)

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 at 12:04:23 GMT Link

That explains why I can never find anyone new to chat with that's not from the US. So is MSN the way to go to find someone to chat with?

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 at 23:12:20 GMT Link

yup, where I live people use MSN and ICQ

they don't even know about AOL and yahoo messenger

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 at 15:29:07 GMT Link

I'm old school. Don't even use IM. Well today, someone on a forum wrote and said: "just add me to your MSN" err, that sounded like IM so I'm surfing around currently wondering what IM client to get. Ha.

This fella was/is from Australia.

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 at 12:56:37 GMT Link

Here in Sweden no one knows what you are talking about if you mention AIM. First there was ICQ, then people started using MSN and ICQ died except for some people that didn't reinstall their OS for a few years. They might still have an ICQ client installed. So as far as EU is concerned there is only one and that is MSN.

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 at 12:21:02 GMT Link

I live in Germany, am using Kopete with 4 networks: Yahoo, Jabber, ICQ and AIM.

95% of the people use ICQ, 10% jabber and half a dozen the other networks. I don't have a single friend that uses MSN here.

Mon, 08 May 2006 at 04:52:08 GMT Link

I'm from Germany, too. I use AIM for my friends in the U.S.A., ICQ for all the people in Germany, and a little bit MSN for everything in between.

My ICQ list is the biggest (about 200 contacts); AIM: 30 contacts; MSN: 15 contacts

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 at 08:55:40 GMT Link

Norway is similar to Sweden in that the few people who had IM in the early days were on ICQ. However, it was a lot less common than IRC, where all the teenagers used to hang out. Then Microsoft released Messenger and took off, together with Hotmail. AOL Messenger is probably big in the United States because AOL itself is so big. Over here, an ordinary person doesn't know what you're talking about if you say AOL. The company has absolutely no presence in Scandinavia whatsoever. Yahoo is known but only among old timers, as an old search engine that nobody uses anymore.

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 at 20:55:21 GMT Link

MSN is not big in the United States, I think, because it is produced by Microsoft, which, as we all know, is notorious for bugs. Their newest version is pretty cool, but very bloated. For a down and dirty workable IM client (native that is) I prefer Yahoo. I run GAIM for an all around IM client.

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 at 23:54:21 GMT Link

For linux users their is also AMSN (dont think it was mentioned above) ... its a straight MSN client for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac and Windows.

the app was a bit buggy at the start but now seems very stable under KDE for me. http://amsn.sourceforge.net/

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 at 16:18:20 GMT Link

This is a great post. I had no idea MSN had this sort of following. I knew some people used it for video conferencing and alot of novices leave it running all the time because they don't know how to disable it, but it's helpful to hear about adoption rates in other parts of the world. I can tend to assume everywhere uses technology about how I do.

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 at 14:22:59 GMT Link

I'm from Ireland, and here everyone uses MSN. I don't know anyone who doesn't. The only other popular one is GoogleTalk/Jabber. Hurray for open protocols!

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 at 21:28:37 GMT Link

In the UK, MSN is almost as synonymous with IM’ing as Google is with searching.

Personally, I got fed up with the constant pestering with ICQ, the add-ons Yahoo installs (even when you deselect the freaking options!), & since AOL is pretty much universally hated here (even amongst casual users) AIM never really took off.

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 at 10:54:33 GMT Link

I'm from Ukraine and the most popular and the most commonly used programme for chatting here is ICQ. Some people use Skype as well. Very few heard about MSN. But Yahoo...I think it's not popular here at all, neither AIM.

http://brideberry.com/

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 at 19:09:43 GMT Link

I havent IM'd in years (i was one of the early ICQers, and once it started to die out i just never picked up a new client), but i have to say, of the linux clients ive tested (which are few -- some for icq i cant remember, and ymessenger/linux -- i dont have kde so their builtins are not an option for me), i'm very pleased with the functionality of amsn.. Enough so that i think i might actually join the msn band wagon.. [shudder]..

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 at 06:13:56 GMT Link

Dude, there isn't a single teenager in the USA that hasn't heard of MSN and MySpace. Your information is incorrect.

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 at 07:08:00 GMT Link

I hate IM, but I use them a lot because I live away from my family and friends. My experience start in the old days of ICQ but at that time I didn't really needed so I just thrash it. In time I star using MSN which is clearly one of the most used in south america. I have some friends using yahoo buy they represent maybe 10% of my contacts. I should say that lot of people use also Skype, mainly because calling capabilities, I personally use it a lot but just to make calls. In the end I use Gaim, is just great, I can make contact using the same software with people from MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk(jabber), ICQ and AOL....is not as annoying as MSN GUI is simplistic and nice....no video that sucks, but perfection is impossible.

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 at 00:25:20 GMT Link

I use Kopete, and I like it better than Gaim. It comes with the kdenetwork program.

Mon, 21 May 2007 at 21:21:26 GMT Link

Hi! I am from Slovenia, Europe. Here MSN is dominant, followed by Skype, Google Talk, ICQ, Y!. I do not know anyone with other IM client. I prefer MSN and Google Talk, sometimes Skype when at the office - talking with co-workers.

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 at 21:20:24 GMT Link

I am from the US and I never even imagined the there were those that used MSN. Here ALL my contacts are Yahoo. I created a MSN account when MSN merged with Yahoo but I only have one contact there and he is a duplicate that I already IM with using Yahoo. In Linux I use Kopete and Pidgin(formerly Gaim)

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 at 16:24:59 GMT Link

In Brazil MSN is huge also.. there are a LOT of people that don't even know that other IM clients exist.

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 at 21:51:55 GMT Link

In Sweden most people use MSN, like someone said above. I don't, however. I got tired of the whole idea, so I mostly use nothing. Sometimes when I'm really bored, I take a look at MSN for my old contacts, using Gaim, but that doesn't happen very often. The few times I talk to someone, I use Google talk. In the late 80's at the university, we didn't even have an Internet connection, so we talked to each other from our terminals, connected to a PR1ME 750 with Primos. LAter they switched to a Unix system, and most of us contacted people thru MUD and later IRC.

When buying my first own computer in early 1999, I used ICQ all the time until I found out that most of my contacts there were gone, so I guess I kind of HAD to switch to MSN.

Since MSN often crashed my comuter (at least I think it did), I uninstalled and I think my computer was a little bit more stable after that, however it was still Windows 98, so it wasn't THAT stable anyway...

Half a year ago I bought a new laptop with XP and Windows Live Messenger, so I tried it once or twice. It was just about the same crap as MSN, and now I login to Gaim now and then. At least my computer never crashed when using Gaim, so far...

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 at 14:58:53 GMT Link

I am using Gaim on Ubuntu 7.04, by the way...

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 at 15:00:48 GMT Link

MSN is BIG in most of Europe. In Belgium, hardly anyone uses Yahoo! or other networks like ICQ. Just about everyone I know uses Windows Live Messenger these days. Because high school students overwhelmingly use Hotmail, you're almost forced to use that service as well though I've personally always used Yahoo!.

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 at 14:21:06 GMT Link

In Slovakia and Czech Republic, everybody use ICQ. I got 68 ICQ contacts compare to 2 MSN and 5 Google talk.

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 at 13:13:40 GMT Link