Marc’s Mind Nothing to see here. Move along.

Linux Soft Phone Roundup

Empathy

Empathy is a relative newcomer to the VoIP/SIP scene.  As part of the Telepathy communications suite, it shows a great deal of promise in providing a seamless online presence.  It fits in perfectly with Gnome and supports many different instant messaging protocols and could be a Grand Unified Messenger.  It could be, but it probably won't.

Its very minimalistic in its design though.  It is intended to work with the Indicator Applet and Indicator Applet Session in the Gnome Desktop.  Thats got a whole slew of different issues that are the subject of a totally different rant.

Empathy sort of meets some of my critera, in a round about way.  It supports NAT and has video.  It also supports multiple accounts, and is quite stable.

Whats missing is a way to choose the audio device you want to use (you have to use PulseAudio tools to do that, which is a complete nightmare), what codecs are available and in what order, a dialpad, hot keys, etc.  The list goes on about all of its strange issues and is well discussed in other forums.

The biggest problem with Empathy is that it hides too much from the user and doesn't give them any control at all over how it operates.  It only allows the most basic configuration options.

So, Empathy is still a long way from being a usable soft phone except for the most basic of users (who probably wouldn't be running Linux to begin with).  The concept is pretty good, though, but the developers have steadfastly decided to ignore requests to give more options and control over the behavior of the application.  Its a pity, too.  Of all various messaging systems I use on a daily basis, Empathy shows the most promise, but it will likely never be fulfilled because they're not allowing users any flexibility or providing the features to replace their existing programs.

Empathy Conclusions

Not usable except for the most basic of needs.  Making a phone call takes a minimum of 5 mouse clicks before you can even get to the dialer.  Receiving calls is great, but with focus stealing prevention, the notification window pops up behind the windows you're running.  Empathy is a solid bit of software that is barely usable.

Perhaps SFLphone?