Dracula on a bike

Well, although usually it’s a good idea to read the original post first, in this instance the original post is at best misleading because it refers to Plasma as an “operating system” rather than a desktop environment.

(Or for those who want to use even more precise terminology: its full name is either “Plasma Desktop” or “KDE Plasma Desktop”, because KDE also has some non-desktop environments such as Plasma Mobile and Plasma Bigscreen… none of which are as popular as Plasma Desktop, though, so usually Plasma Desktop is colloquially called just “Plasma”.)

There’s also a newer federated chat (plus VoIP signalling) protocol called Matrix that’s worth a look.

One feature that sets it apart from XMPP is its support for multi-client synchronization: if you log into the same user account from multiple clients (e.g. where one of them is a desktop app and another one is a smartphone app), your chat history will be synchronized across them. Or as one of the Matrix developers put it: “XMPP is all about message passing, whereas Matrix is all about state synchronisation”.

On the downside, though: although the Matrix protocol is designed to support presence-status, it seems that many (?) of the public Matrix homeservers have that feature disabled for performance reasons.