Interesting Improvements In GNOME 2.24

When it comes to the default GNOME artwork, there are a few improvements there as well. New wallpapers have been added as well as new themes and icons. A compact widget theme has also been made for running GNOME on small screens. On the media side of things, GNOME Media has better integration now with PulseAudio sound server, which has been in Fedora for a few releases now and was recently adopted by Ubuntu.

With GNOME 2.24, Empathy has become the preferred instant messaging client. Empathy is based off Gossip's user-interface (the earlier GNOME IM client) and uses the Telepathy library. Empathy/Telepathy currently supports connecting to Jabber, Salut, Google Talk, AIM, Novell GroupWise, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo. Empathy does also support making voice and video calls using SIP and Jingle.