Can someone list some alternatives (that have correct scaling) to chatty as chatty tries to do OMEMO the “right” way which means I can’t send OMEMO encrypted messages by default and have to go through a process of receiving a request, disabling purple, restarting app, enabling and then quickly disabling purple and then encrypted messaging working. Chatty also can’t handle voice calling or a voice recording shared to the device from my testing with chatsecure.
edit:
I’m pretty upset. I don’t think I am asking for so much from this device and it isn’t even close to meeting my expectation. I expect a phone to be a communication device and I cannot communicate with this device securely with open standards that have existed longer than me. I just want a simple program to use to be able to do voice calls, send voice notes, send files and send messages on that interacts properly for one client for each android, ios and windows. It doesn’t exist.
Try Dino or Pidgin. Those are working properly.
There is Kaidan available in the repos. There is also an Adaptive version of Dino that you can build from source.
Version of dino I am using is fine and kaidan gives a network error so I cannot login.
what version of Kaidan are you using? From the repos? Byzantium, Amber? Flatpak?
Kaidan also does not support OMEMO yet (it’s going to be supported soon though), so it’s not really worth trying at this point.
I’m pretty upset. I don’t think I am asking for so much from this device and it isn’t even close to meeting my expectation. I expect a phone to be a communication device and I cannot communicate with this device securely with open standards that have existed longer than me. I just want a simple program to use to be able to do voice calls, send voice notes, send files and send messages on that interacts properly for one client for each android, ios and windows. It doesn’t exist.
Honestly, you are asking a lot. XMPP+OMEMO is very niche, and XMPP voice calls is likely even more niche. Purism developers are working hard on Chatty, but currently more relevant features like a proper Matrix implementation and MMS support (which somehow is still popular in some countries) have a higher priority – and IMHO rightfully so.
After all, GNU/Linux on phones is a very nascent software ecosystem with maybe a few hundred developers tops. Expecting this to be as capable as Android which has been marketed since 2008 and has billions of dollars and maybe millions of developers (definitely tens of thousands) behind it, is, frankly, not very sane.
That said, I really think that the adaptive branch of Dino should (as in ought to be, but sadly is not) be packaged for the Librem 5, alongside quite a few other apps we’ve listed on LinuxPhoneApps.org, to have options for e.g. Signal readily available.
Byzantium from the pureos repos. Whatever the latest version was.
Every client I’ve used has always supported it even if it was a little buggy to setup for someone you are contacting for the first time.
Well what are my options? I heard of linphone but I can’t make it pass audio to the small speaker to carry around properly and instead comes out of loudspeaker. Someone said where they plug in headphones but that is incredibly inconvenient and I also do not like having to carry around headphones all the time just because a program doesn’t let me select the correct speaker.
I believe they are but progress has got to be somewhat slow. 3 years developing it and because they want to do it the “right” way which I understand their reasoning for, it means for the users, they will not be able to interact with pretty much any other client other than I believe pidgin and gaijin. They can complain all they want about how devs of other clients should just use correct standards so things work properly but that isn’t really relevant from a user experience standpoint.
Getting matrix working in there fair enough I mean I remember purism saying this is the first native matrix phone and I don’t see it anywhere but is MMS so important? I have never seen anybody use MMS.
Are you joking? Me asking for a well working XMPP client is equivalent to asking for the same quality as android? Not even close. I am asking for it to be a communication device. If I was expecting it to be as polished as android, I’d expect great scaling for everything, video camera, a camera for every single thing I could think of, etc. I am not asking for that. I am asking for there to be a communication program that works. If not XMPP then something else.
Millions of devs behind android or making android programs? The money I understand but the dev count I don’t. If you are referring to devs for programs, I am still pretty restricted on android only using programs from f-droid except 2 which I put in a work profile and limit permissions for although they are still free software.
I don’t think that will be happening any time soon.
MMS was implement outside of Purism, Purism continues to developing what it promised to be encrypted native calls and sms, Purism has a dedicated developer for this happen and it will be available one day, I say one day because Purism is working on miracles with few very few resources.
Purism it doing a Beautiful work on Librem5 in general on this unique and complex machine.
All the big things like the thing you want it at the moment will available soon, if you need a XMMP client is Dino the best option, Dino it already supported to Librem 5, Dino the Free-Software app will have all you want it like Calls, Video, SMS under L5 soon.
Please do not compare the L5 with Android devices in general because L5 is in another good level.
I know this.
The only way I see that being possible is sharing of PGP keys but I’m guessing this will not work cross device as other devices simply do not support this. I know you can do so with SMS on android with silence but that is about it. It doesn’t really make sense to have encrypted voice calls that works with other platforms any other way.
And that is why I bought this device but it has been in development for years and nothing really works as expected. Even the default programs like the software store has a small amount of scaling issue at normal 200% zoom which is pretty crazy.
Soon seems like an incredible overstatement. There is so much work for them to do for preinstalled programs alone and based on a few mentions here and there for information for the speed of development, I’m guessing it will be at least a year for chatty to even work as expected with other XMPP clients and for matrix to be implemented.
Yep I am currently using. Works pretty well. Much better than chatty with initial setup (with other XMPP users with OMEMO).
Calls seem pretty messed up for XMPP unless both are using the same client, SMS I don’t see much of a reason for as chatty works fine for that and video seriously? The phone’s camera, from what I have seen, doesn’t support video yet so how would they implement it to work already?
You put words in my mouth earlier saying as if I expected this to be as capable as android which I never did but this comment now I don’t understand very well. Of course I will compare them. Not to would be ignorance. Making pros and cons to each is natural. I like a lot of what the L5 is offering despite not many apps so far that work properly for the display size but I need a messaging program that actually works. Voice calling securely is a requirement to me for using a mobile phone. You can argue that the android device was spying and sending microphone input back somewhere but at least the calling applications were open and secure even if the device wasn’t (was using grapheneOS). I can’t see much for the L5 for this area yet. As said before, linphone is pretty much the only option here at the moment but has its own problems.
Me neither. What I was trying to say was: At least of the apps we have (signal-desktop, Axolotl or signal-rs) should be easier to install for users.
If you know people who use macOS or iOS, ask them what a pain XMPP+OMEMO is on these platforms. Or checkout omemo.top – things could be better. That said, I’ve abandoned XMPP mostly, as even syncing between multiple machines was tough, when using only Gajim, Conversations and Dino with unreadable/missed messages requiring me to try if I could decrypt it on another computer. Apparently you were more lucky.
Sorry for writing this!
I just started the adaptive Dino on my PinePhone btw, and saw that it has a call button for one of my contacts. So maybe you should try building it on your own, or you can try this adaptive deb (I found it on the Mobian Wiki).
Signal-desktop has scaling issues, axolotl wouldn’t work for me and I am currently compiling signal-rs again but I have my doubts on it working to build.
I know people that are and I’ve never heard such. One client for example just has a padlock to click to enable. The website linked is pretty shocking but it isn’t so bad as at least there is one working client with OMEMO on each platform.
I did what it said on the wiki but no different. Can you share a screenshot? Where do you see the call button? What client was working for calling?
I haven’t used calling (and won’t), as I only have two XMPP contacts, of which one shows this option, and I barely know the guy (plus: completely different time zone).
Here’s the screenshot:
This is a current build straight from git on Arch Linux ARM – you can build it on the Librem 5, too, it does not even take very long, you just need to figure it out 
I do not understand what I am doing wrong! I compiled and installed but my GUI is nothing as scaled well as yours.
Did you checkout the branch feature/handy after cloning? That’s something I sometimes forget.
I tried that now but I get error while compiling after install of dependencies.
I have rebuilt the Dino version from Debian experimental on Librem 5 and calls are working. You can get the deb from https://people.debian.org/~praveen/dino/
I really think this should be offered by default as it is a clear improvement over the current xmpp app (chatty). As for it being not merged in master, they are committed to merging it along with gtk 4 and libadwaita.
We would prefer that adaptive support to dino-im was merged upstream, so it would not require to maintain what in essence is a non-official version of dino-im.
Dino developers have stated that they want to switch to GTK4+libadwaita. That opens the door for upstream adaptive dino.
also I cannot promise an outcome or anticipate the reply, but you can open a ticket here raising the issue of packaging the adaptive version of dino.
EDIT: here being: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps_Issues/-/issues
Uhh, ahh. I try to use chatty for XMPP and have a case that most contacts can do OMEMO, but some don’t offer it. Can you elaborate on the steps to enable OMEMO encryption for that? It sounds bothersome but doable :-).