I've been using Kopete for a while to chat to all my Windows-using friends (yes, I realise that makes them the scum of the earth but they're the only friends I have). It has its quirks I suppose (like big file transfers failing) but generally does everything I want it to.

However, recently I've been playing an MMORPG called Dofus (definitely worth checking out) and in order to play two characters at once I need two instances of the game running at once. In order to get the best speed I decided to log into the failsafe terminal instead of loading KDE and all the stuff that goes along with that. I also decided to try out GAIM as I reckoned it would have a smaller memory footprint than Kopete from previous experience of using it.

The thing that struck me most were the improvements to its interface since the last time I used it. It's no longer ugly! It's got a nice, clean and intuitive interface and I have no trouble using it. I'm definitely using GAIM now instead of Kopete. This of course adds one more to the list of GNOME apps I actually use.

Another thing I discovered that I liked was Metacity. In the failsafe mode you only get an Xterm and so have to start a window manager from that. I'd forgotten briefly what the KDE one was called and so ran Metacity instead as it was a name that stuck with me. Again, I like the simpleness of it. Of course, KWin's probably just as good and it's my own fault for over-customising it >_<

I know this sounds utterly ridiculous but I might end up sticking with the failsafe terminal. Who needs a desktop environment? Just give me an X session and a terminal and I'm perfectly happy ;)