Re: default messaging/VoIP client for Debian 8/Jessie

[Martín Ferrari <tincho@tincho.org>]

On 30/03/14 15:20, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:

> Please use https://wiki.debian.org/UnifiedCommunications as starting 
> point.  There is already link to a (mini-)HOWTO on some server setup, 
> but if that does not adequately cover conference calls (I haven't tried 
> yet myself) then consider extending that wiki page instead of sharing 
> details here ;-)

What I see missing from the Wiki page and this discussion are other SIP
clients, like linphone, Yate client, SFLphone, etc. Coincidentally,
linphone and Yate are the best I have found so far. Each one with its
own limitations and strenghts.

At the same time, my experience with Jitsi was not great. I have just
installed it again to try it out, and it just fails to connect to any of
my accounts, I am guessing it is choking on IPv6. Also, seeing the
amount of exceptions it throws on the console is not really reassuring.
Empathy was simply not usable for me, specially if you had any kind of
connection issues, it seemed impossible to debug, and the async nature
of its modules was infuriating.

Note that my criteria here is being able to make SIP voice calls, I
don't really care about the rest, but still to this day I don't think
there is a single decent SIP client in Debian, which will give me good
audio quality, support multiple accounts reasonably, survive
disconnections or other network issues, be integrated with some address
book, work over NAT issues more or less painlessly, and have a decent UI.

-- 
Martín Ferrari (Tincho)