I recently tried to put an instance of my account on Jami on a Linux Mint box and it didn’t go well.
Let me explain:
- source = Android client, Windows client, backup file
- destination = Linux Mint 22.3 XFCE, with updates to latest as of yesterday.
Mint offers Jami via it’s Software manager in two variants:
- as Flatpak installation. This installs fine.
- as native installation. This fails to install.
The Flatpak variant, once installed apparently runs, but can’t import account from a backup, because it’s file-open dialog does not see the .jac file, also it sees nothing even if set to display all file types.
At some point, don’t know how, I managed to have it see the .jac file, but it entered it as if it were a subdirectory or archive. Totally unusable.
From several Google searches I learned that this is a known issue, still not fixed.
The Flatpak variant did import account using QR code from Android. But this is not always available when source is another computer, depending on webcam existance or performance.
Removed the Flatpak variant.
Download Jami for GNU/Linux has a section for Linux Mint, which mentions Mint 22, without minor version(s).
Using the “Option 1: install Jami from official repository” I get an uninstallable situation, because it complains about multiple incompatible dependencies in libc and qt libraries, at least.
I did not try the downloadable .deb.
The Mint 22 section should be clarified and improved on the JAMI site.
After I remove the Jami repo keys and apt sources, I ran again apt update.
Then I did an apt install jami and … magically it worked. It installed from Mint repositories.
This build of Jami successfully loaded the backup file and started working with my account.
Bottom line, the overall basic user experience is as close to inability to use as possible, requires experienced Linux user to try multiple variants, one of which luckily worked.
Please help improve on these.