Pidgin can be very hit-and-miss with which parts of the protocol it implements. It is also a multi protocol client so a lot of the functionality is presented in a protocol agnostic way, which may not be what you're looking for if you're using it for XMPP alone.

For a desktop XMPP client, check out Gajim. It's stable and implements all that a user would expect (server side history, omemo).