Slashdot is running a story about Linux IM clients. The article to which the story refers claims that the lack of a good IM client is hurting Linux as much as anything else. I find this surprising, since Gaim seems better than any IM client I've used (I've tried most native clients, Trillian, and Adium). Trillian is just plain fugly and unusable and most native clients have ads and only connect to one network (which makes them useless to me). To be fair, Adium isn't bad, but it could be better. Am I missing something?

More surprising is that the author (who resides in Belgium) seems to think that MSN dominates:

Young people in European countries just can't live without MSN.

I'm curious to know whether others agree with this. Based on my "buddy list" (which is pretty big), Yahoo is the only IM network competing with AIM in terms of popularity. The only MSN people I have are Andi and Zeev. I have more Google Talk contacts than that.