[MiddleEndian]

It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.

* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.

* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages

* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on

* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).

[anthk]

I used Kopete with inline videos and a newspaper-like theme. It was amazing and beautiful. That under 256MB of RAM. Nowadays you would need 2GB to do the same.

[MiddleEndian]

That sounds about right. I've never used Kopete myself but the KDE team always puts out good work for OSS UIs

[anthk]

And bear in mind KDE3 was considered the bloated DE, as XFCE (even the GTK2 build) could snappily run with 64 MB of RAM and maybe less with a light GTK engine (yes, choosing the GTK2 engine mattered a lot back in the day).

And, yes, choosing Pidgin and a light window manager such as Fluxbox/Openbox could make run machine run well with 64MB at really fast speeds.