I am installing feisty for friends trying to convince them to migrate
to linux yet I have found some more or less stupid things which hold some
of them (or make them revert from time to time) to windows. It’s not MS office or games which they miss but
some features in yahoo messenger which I cannot replicate
using pidgin (gaim).

Here is a list of what has been qualified as great improvements from a yahoo user point of view.

  • setting a status message without being away: since 2.0.0 you can now go
    Change Status/New… At this dialog you setup your message and your “Status”, which can be Available and yet still have a message.
  • change the smiley theme such that the smiley’s looks more familiar. You can try this one here from gnome-look.
  • and finally the most tormenting task was to make the buddy icon display on windows clients as most of the time all what they see is a black square instead of the buddy icon. After trying several formats and sizes it seems the only one which works perfectly is a 96×96 png image which can be seen from all windows yahoo contacts without a problem.

Note: the last version of yahoo messenger I used currently was so old and this happened so long ago that gaim seem quite similar but this is for those which are unlike me.