XMPP client Kaidan 0.4.0 released after one and a half years of development

This is a big update to this lesser-known Jabber/XMPP client for Linux, Android, macOS and Windows. Major changes includes support for file sharing, downloadable attachments, offline message support and image previews in chats. Too bad it doesn't even compile.

XMPP, also known as Jabber, is a free instant messaging standard some people used before Discord, Telegram and to a very small degree Matrix took over. Some communities are still using it. XMPP does have the advantage of being a free an open protocol. There are some glaring security issues (servers supports SSL to end-users without mandating server-to-server SSL as one example) but that does not stop a small amount of people from using it to communicate with their friends.

Kaidan is a multi-platform XMPP client which aims to make XMPP easy to use for average people. The latest version has a very long list of improvements listed in the release announcement. That page has versions for Windows, macOS, Android and source, an AppImage and a FLatpak build for Linux users. We tried the AppImage and found that it will not let you connect to any XMPP servers because of problems with the way it calls qt.network.ssl.

This was not enough to make us give up and admit defeat so we acquired the source code and checked it out.

tar xfvJ kaidan-0.4.0.tar.xz ; cd kaidan-0.4.0 ; mkdir build; cd build ; cmake .. revealed that we did not have the required dependencies so we installed qxmpp-devel qxmpp-qt5-devel and made cmake happy. However, make was not at all happy with src/Message.cpp line 60 and refused to produce a binary. There is of course the option of fixing the source-code so it compiles but I'd rather have lunch. We could have asked for help in the support chat room at https://i.kaidan.im/ but that requires a working XMPP client. Kaidan developers recommend using something called "ChatSecure" for iOS on that page. We don't have a iOS.

More than one and a half years of development went into this new Kaidan 0.4.0 release. It is quite sad that it turned out to be a useless failure and a complete waste of our time. The bare minimum requirement for a XMPP client is the ability to actually connect to XMPP servers.

You can read the full release announcement at https://www.kaidan.im/2019/07/08/kaidan-0.4.0/

Update: Kaidan 0.4.1 has since been released and that version can connect to the Internet just fine. The information outlined in this article does not apply to the current version of Kaidan.