Pidgin doesn't have a non-"highly experimental" OMEMO plugin yet and Gajim has major issues e.g. changes to privacy preferences silently failing. A lot of people I know are still on OTR.

Pidgin is quite simply a terrible XMPP client with none of the features of modern XMPP. I haven't had any issues with OMEMO with my contacts on Gajim.

Well I can believe that Gajim+OMEMO works, but I didn't trust it to setup an account after noticing the undesirable defaults in preferences->advanced->privacy then realising that unticking them had no effect (they're reticked when I open the preferences again).

Do you know any alternative Linux clients?

I use dino.im and kaidan.im also exists (though they implemented a newer version of the spec which isn't backwards compatible: https://invent.kde.org/network/kaidan/-/issues/254 ).

Thanks, I did have a look at dino-im recently and was surprised it has no options at all - just a 'set up account' wizard that doesn't offer proxy settings before making connections. It wouldn't let me add a [email protected] account because it couldn't connect...

I'll have a dig in the conf files, perhaps I can configure an account manually.