KMess, one of the best Windows Live Messenger clients around for Linux, was released to version 1.5 this week afters months of development and improvements.

The new features introduced since the last full, stable release (1.4.3) include:

• custom emoticons
• support for personal messages (including now playing information)
• nudges
• speedy file transfers (including progress information)
• full display picture support

All of these, on top of the existing features (support for receiving winks and offline messages, setting nicknames for your contacts, chat logging, auto-responders, email notifications, and customisable chat window styles/layouts and emoticons sets), make it a fully-featured client and a worthy competitor for a place on your KDE desktop.

This really is a refreshing client with a great interface that I believe even the official Messenger team could learn from! It's fairly simple but just works and is a pleasure to use so if you use Linux (with KDE desktop) give it a try today.

>> Official KMess website
>> Full list of features
>> Download the latest version
>> Screenshots of the latest version
>> View the full changelog for version 1.5