KDE and GNOME in Fedora 10

Fedora 10 offers installation options for both GNOME 2.24 and KDE 4.1, the latest versions of the two most popular Linux desktop environments. GNOME 2.24, which was released in September, introduced the Empathy instant messaging client and also brought tabbed browsing and other improvements to GNOME's Nautilus file manager.

Empathy is built on the Telepathy instant messaging framework and is designed to supply audio/video chat functionality and significantly tighter desktop integration than the incumbent Pidgin messaging program. Although Empathy shows an enormous amount of promise and could prove to be a big step forward for GNOME messaging, it is still very rough around the edges and is missing some features. Some distributions—including Ubuntu—have declined to ship Empathy in recent releases. It was initially included in the Fedora 10 release candidate, but it was swapped back out for Pidgin in the final release at the very last minute. Users who want to try Empathy can still install it from the repository, but Pidgin is still the default in this release. My own testing has confirmed that it is sufficiently robust for day-to-day use, but I think it really needs a bit more time to bake before it will be crispy enough to beat Pidgin in a taste test.