It looks like many open source developers decided to release new versions of their software on the first days of 2016, as today we would like to inform you about the availability of the twelfth maintenance release in the Pidgin 2.10 series.

According to the official changelog, which we've attached at the end of the article for reference, Pidgin 2.10.12 is mostly a bugfix release that adds several enhancements for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows, and updates some of the core components to their latest versions as of January 2, 2016.

Among the general changes, we can mention Python 3 support for the purple-url-handler component, support for the shout smile to match the default theme of the software, support for libgadu 1.12.1 for the Gadu-Gadu IM protocol, and support for the GStreamer 1.0 open source multimedia framework.

For Windows users, Pidgin 2.10.12 updates numerous dependencies, among which we can mention SILC 1.1.12, NSPR 4.10.10, NSS 3.20.1, Perl 5.20.1, Cyrus SASL 2.1.26, and libxml2 2.9.2. Additionally, support for TCL (Tool Command Language) plugins has been removed.

AIM, voice and video improvements

Thanks to some bug reports, it is now no longer possible to delete transient startup statuses, gateway proxies are better supported for the AIM instant messaging protocol, smileys are no longer rendered in the headers of the History plugin, farstream02 0.2.7 is now required, and the third-party SIPE plugin should offer better voice and video support.

As mentioned, this is the twelfth maintenance build for the stable Pidgin 2.10 branch of the world's most popular free, cross-platform and multi-protocol IM (Instant Messaging) client. You can download Pidgin 2.10.12 for GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia. More details about this release can be found in the changelog below and on the project's website.