Meeting Dino – Modern XMPP Chat Client

Hello, friends. Many organizations and teams still use Jabber/XMPP servers for their internal communications. To take advantage of it, you need a stable and secure client. Today, we will meet Dino, which is a Modern XMPP Chat Client.

Getting to know Dino

According to the project website:

Dino is a modern open-source chat client for the desktop. It focuses on providing a clean and reliable Jabber/XMPP experience while having your privacy in mind.

It supports end-to-end encryption with OMEMO and OpenPGP and allows configuring privacy-related features such as read receipts and typing notifications.

As you might expect, the project is open source, so you won’t have any licensing issues and will be able to use it in almost any situation. Furthermore, Dino’s interface is very modern as it is made with GTK 4 and libadwaita.

So let’s install it.

Install Dino on Linux

Linux’s support is guaranteed by the development team. So installing it on Linux is a simple task, but let’s break it down.

Install Dino on Linux using the package manager

Dino is present in most of the current Linux distributions. This makes the installation process quite safe and easy.

• For Debian, Ubuntu and derivatives like Linux Mint and Elementary OS

On these distributions, just run

sudo apt update
sudo apt install dino-im

• Fedora

Fedora users only need to run

sudo dnf install dino

• Arch Linux and derivatives such as Manjaro

sudo pacman -S dino

For the rest of the distributions, you can consult this link.

Then, just open the tool from the main menu of your distro.

Using Flatpak

The above method is very safe since it relies on the official repositories of each distribution, but there is a small problem and that is that Dino development is very active and new versions are released frequently.

So, the above method, although secure, does not provide the latest stable version on non-rolling-release distributions like Debian or Ubuntu.

So to solve this, you can use Flatpak. In the case of Linux Mint, Fedora, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS and Manjaro, Flatpak is already installed and configured, and you don’t have to do much more.

But if you use Debian or Ubuntu, you have to run

sudo apt install flatpak

For Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S flatpak

For OpenSUSE

sudo zypper in flatpak

With Flatpak ready for battle, you can then add the Flathub repository where the tool is hosted.

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Finally, install it

flatpak install flathub im.dino.Dino

And then, run it from the main menu or from the terminal

flatpak run im.dino.Dino

Conclusion

Dino is a modern tool to have a simple, secure, and above all, functional XMMP client.