Ferdium: the One Chat Platform to Rule Them All

Introduction

I have been looking for a way of accessing my WhatsApp conversations from my Linux desktop. Unfortunately, no native Linux application has been developed, so I thought my only option was the WhatsApp web UI. The web interface, however, has been quite buggy and exhibits poor performance. Moreover, since I prevent cookies in my web browser, not only do I need to login every time with the QR code (which is a pain) but rejecting cookies also seems to interfere with the login process, preventing me entirely from loging in.

In my search for an alternative that also supports the Linux operating system, I stumbled upon the open-source Franz program, hosted on GitHub. It provides an interface to all the common chat services in one place, including WhatsApp, which works great! However, Franz relies on a fremium business model, which limits the number of services that free-tier uses can use at one time and prevents the login of self-hosted chats, such as Zulip of Mattermost. This was quite inconvenient as I rely on them for work communications.

Ferdium

I was delighted to find out that there is a fully free and open-source fork of Franz called Ferdium, which removes all of its restrictions. It provides access to huge selection of messaging services from one place—many of which I have never even heard of.

Subset of the services supported by Ferdium.

In addition, it provides a slew of convenient keyboard shortcuts for navigating between the various services and contains various productivity features, such as integrated TODO lists to keep track of tasks. Best of all, since it is built using the Electron framework, it is platform-agnostic and runs on Windows, Mac and, yes, Linux.

Conclusion

Ferdium has been a game-changer for managing my messaging services across platforms. With Ferdium, I could say goodbye to the seemingly endlessly increasing number of chat service apps that I had downloaded on all my devices. If you are also overwhelmed by all these different messaging services, Ferdium might be the right tool for you!