If you follow tech news, you’ve probably heard of Franz, as it generated quite a buzz when it came out earlier this year. If you’re not happy with it, but don’t want to use Hangouts in the browser either, consider the purple-hangouts plugin for the trusty old Pidgin. YakYak doesn’t support multiple Hangouts accounts at the moment. You can preview the chat history, change your presence status, and get notified when other users are typing. Still, it gives you everything that Hangouts has, plus additional color schemes. This makes the YakYak client relatively big – when unzipped, it takes up over a hundred MBs, approximately two times more than GIMP. YakYak is not a traditional desktop app instead, it’s a “wrapped”, windowed version of the web app created with the Electron framework. It supports group chats, native desktop notifications, and multimedia integration. Despite the somewhat unfortunate name (it sounds a lot like Yik Yak, another messaging app), YakYak isn’t bad at all. Luckily, people have taken the matter into their own hands and created YakYak. Sure, you can use Hangouts in the browser, but it’s not always a pleasant experience. Google doesn’t seem to care much about making a Hangouts desktop client for Linux. Platforms: Linux, Android, OS X, Windows 2. Others will have to wait a while, or start using Ring anyway, because it’s already a great app. Linux users can work around this problem by using the Evolution Data Server to provide contact information to Ring. Since Ring is still in beta, some features are missing, like the (arguably essential) option to manage your contacts. With features like these, plus the ability to make conference calls, Ring is perfectly suitable for small businesses and remote workers. Ring lets you put a call on hold, share your desktop with the caller, and send files to other users. It also supports SIP (Session Initialization Protocol) accounts, so after you create one, you can use Ring to call landline and mobile phones. Ring achieves secure, decentralized communication thanks to OpenDHT and GnuTLS libraries. You can have multiple Ring accounts, and the Settings dialogs are quite detailed, with options for auto-answering calls, audio and video codecs, chat history, and of course, encryption. You’re supposed to give it to your friends so they can add you as a contact. Once you start using Ring, it will generate a Ring ID for you. However, it requires a daemon (background service) and a client, so make sure to install both. The installation is fairly simple, as Ring offers pre-packaged installers for several Linux distributions. Ring has it all: video and audio calls, regular instant messages, group chats, and call recording. Unlike Skype, it cares about your privacy, so all messages and calls are encrypted, and the developers claim that no files are saved on their servers. Ring is best described as a free and open source Skype replacement. So, if you are looking for new messenger apps for Linux or just alternatives to popular messengers on Linux, here are ten interesting suggestions: Well, you can install a desktop client for one of the already popular IM services, or try to convince your friends to switch to a new messenger app. But what happens when you want to chat from your Linux computer? These days, IM is more mobile than ever, and you probably have two or more messaging apps on your smartphone. Even before the age of social media, there were always multiple contenders: you may have preferred ICQ, but some of your friends were on MSN Messenger, some used Yahoo! Messenger, and others stuck to AIM.
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