I recommend Franz (http://meetfranz.com/). Does Whatsapp, works on Linux, mac, pc. Supports Slack, WeChat, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, GroupMe and Skype.

This is just a wrapper for web clients of the "protocols" they support. So WhatsApp is web.whatsapp.com in a tab, Skype is web.skype.com, etc.

It appears as though WhatsApp desktop is basically a wrapper on web.whatsapp.com as well.

I assumed as much, and yet still no Linux version. I don't use WhatsApp anyway but it's still disappointing.

Way to undermine the hard work of talented developers. Is that envy? You should see all the features its offer before calling it just a "wrapper".

I think you're reading a bit too much into his comment. It's true that the phrasing can seem dismissive, but I don't think it's meant as such to that extreme of a degree.

It being a collection of wrappers is either true or not and is not necessarily a value judgment, but a technical detail.

It IS a wrapper around the web version. To be fair, the web version is very solid. It even warns you when your phone's battery is running low.

...which, for what it's worth, is an Electron app. :)

Eh, I'll still take it.

Wow that's cool. This seems to be the spiritual successor to Adium (maybe Pidgin, not sure if that's still active).

Edit: Tried it out. It's visually pretty but it wouldn't even let me add my Slack account (we use SSO, maybe they haven't updated for that). And then when I clicked the Send Email to Franz, the email was prepopulated with some social "download franz!" message.

I really wish it supported Signal.

Edit:

Still pleased to use it, I don't like the Skype client for Linux.

Thanks for the recommendation. This looks fantastic. If only it could do iMessage (which I know is a whole different beast).

Thanks, this looks amazing!

No IRC?

Was super interested, until I realised no LINE nor KakaoChat :(

It is an Electron app from what I can see on OSX (Electron/React Native/Mantle/Squirrel). No voice calls though.

It is indeed an Electron app. I guess they just figured it wasn't worth the trouble to package and test it for Linux.

It takes zero effort to package Electon apps for Linux, there are plenty of tools available that will package it for all platforms with one command.

And so far, I've not seen any differences or platform specific bugs.

Sure, you'd expect a big company like WhatsApp to do QA testing on every platform they release for, but it's a shame that even with the barrier of entry is so negligibly low, that they still won't provide a Linux build. Even if it's just for the latest Ubuntu LTS that's fine, other distros can repackage it themselves.

Telegram forever ahead...

Minus the whole end-to-end encryption thing... which is still missing in their Linux gui client.

There are alternate clients that support it on Linux. "Cutegram"

http://aseman.co/en/products/cutegram/

And from all their other clients, if the industry assessments of their so-called encrypted protocol are to be believed.

Yeah, no use to me either, althogh I did recently upgrade my windows 7 vm to windows 10 (there's no windows 7 version either). Very odd.

It is electron app.