As beautiful as Pidgin’s OSD notifications are, I find they become a nuisance after a short while. They don’t seem to go away when you mark yourself as busy or have another applications, such as a movie, running at full screen. On top of that I generally don’t chat with the majority of the contacts on my MSN list very often so I really don’t need to be notified every time they log in.

Strangely, the option to disable the OSD notifications isn’t in the preferences screen for Pidgin. I was a little stumped by this as I expected it to be there. So I did a bit of digging and discovered it was actually a plugin which is enabled by default. To disable it, simply follow these steps:

• Select Tools from the main menu
• Click Plugins
• Uncheck Libnotify Popups
• Click the Close button

Now you’ll no longer be nagged at every time one of your contacts logs into the network.