I still prefer pidgin, but it needs a lot of love to make it a reasonably modern XMPP client:

- https://github.com/danielkraic/Pidgin-XEP-0136-plugin adds XEP-0136 (needs "mam_archive" on prosody)

- https://github.com/gkdr/carbons adds XEP-0280 (Carbons)

- https://github.com/Junker/purple-xmpp-http-upload adds XEP-363 (HTTP uploads)

- https://github.com/gkdr/lurch adds XEP-0384 (OMEMO)

- https://github.com/noonien-d/pidgin-xmpp-receipts XEP-0184 (message delivery receipts)

The real pain for Pidgin is the complete lack of XEP-313 due to Pidgin's aged logging system, and I would really like to see a working message sync for Pidgin :(

EDIT: https://github.com/CkNoSFeRaTU/pidgin apparently has had XEP-313 patched into Pidgin for years now. Combined with lurch and Carbons, message sync is working fine.

I wish Pidgin would just disappear. It is absolutely unusable without all these plugins in a modern multi client world, and most users don't know they need them.

The delivery receipts issue is a decade old [0]! Libpurple is a mess to implement all the modern features, because it tries to support the baseline of so many different protocols.

[0] https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/6940

I wish it would reborn, that I agree on. Disappear - no. Please no. I still need to connect to 3-4 systems, and the last thing I want is 3-4 messengers, especially if all of them are webapps. Pidgin is still the only thing standing between me and total messenger madness.

For sure! I use gajim as my main Desktop client.

And thanks for the link to salut-a-toi, I hadn't heard of it.