quotient-im

Quaternion

C++2017–2023

quotient-im / Quaternion

Quaternion

A Qt-based IM client for Matrix

Mobile & Desktop Communication & Social

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

7Distinct people

8Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

711GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A Qt-based IM client for Matrix

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

nheko-reborn/nheko · linked in 3 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-11-01 09:48:56 UTC to 2023-03-26 22:08:13 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

8 sources

yjftsjthsd-h·Mar 26, 2023

> Meanwhile there have been exactly zero new F/OSS desktop apps for over a decade except IDEs and even those are mostly Electron-based. What a mess. Er, that's just objectively not true. Here's exactly one new FOSS desktop app: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion - I don't know how old it is, but it's a Matrix client and Matrix is only 8 years old so less than a decade.

In OpenSUSE Linux gains momentum

superboum·Dec 23, 2022

3 days ago, I installed Haiku on bare metal: an old PC from ~2004. I was not aware that a new version was planned at that time, but the upgrade was completely smooth. My idea when I installed Haiku was to make my own version of the "old computer challenge"[1], with an emphasis on using GUI apps. Similarly to @probono (a FOSS dev), I also found Haiku "shockingly good"[2] at being a lightweight, responsive, easy-to-use desktop OS. After some patching, I was even able to compile Tectonic[3], a modern LaTeX engine written in Rust, and Quaternion a Matrix client supporting E2EE[4]. All that running on a single core Athlon 64 and 1.5GB of RAM. I posted some screenshots in a Mastodon threads if you are curious[5] (but my posts are in french sorry :/). And of course this comment is posted from Haiku! [1]: https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-07-

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old-computer-challe... [2]: https://medium.com/@probonopd/my-first-day-with-haiku-shocki... [3]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ [4]: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion [5]: https://mastodon.tedomum.net/@tgoldoin/109554115997967651

In Haiku R1/beta4

nyanpasu64·May 28, 2022

In terms of shared-memory threading concurrency, Send and Sync, and the distinction between &T and &Mutex<T> and &mut T, were a revelation when I first learned them. It was a principled approach to shared-memory threading, with Send/Sync banning nearly all of the confusing and buggy entangled-state codebases I've seen and continue to see in C++ (much to my frustration and exasperation), and &Mutex<T> providing a cleaner alternative design (there's an excellent article on its design at http://cliffle.com/blog/rust-mutexes/). My favorite simple concurrent data structure is https://docs.rs/triple_buffer/latest/triple_buffer/struct.Tr.... It beautifully demonstrates how you can achieve principled shared mutability, by defining two "handle" types (living on different threads), each carrying thread-local state (not TLS) and a pointer to shared

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memory, and only allowing each handle to access shared memory in a particular way. This statically prevents one thread from calling a method intended to run on another thread, or accessing fields local to another thread (since the methods and fields now live on the other handle). It also demonstrates the complexity of reasoning about lock-free algorithms (https://github.com/HadrienG2/triple-buffer/issues/14). I suppose &/&mut is also a safeguard against event-loop and reentrancy bugs (like https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion/issues/702). I don't think Rust solves the general problem of preventing deadlocks within and between processes (which often cross organizational boundaries between projects and distinct codebases, with no clear contract on allowed behavior and which party in a deadlock is at fault), and non-atomicity between processes on a single machine (see my PipeWire criticism at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31519951). File saving is also difficult (https://danluu.com/file-consistency/), though I find that fsync-then-rename works well enough if you don't need to preserve metadata or write through file (not folder) symlinks. I wonder how https://lwn.net/Articles/789600/ is doing now.

In Notes on Concurrency Bugs (2016)

gpanders·May 19, 2021

Your UI complaints apply only to Element (the flagship client) rather than to Matrix the protocol. As others have said, there are other, less-flashy clients available (and others under development). Some examples: Quaternion: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion Hydrogen: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web Nheko: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko

In Leaving Freenode for a new network

Arathorn·Dec 19, 2019

There are a bunch of very promising native desktop Matrix clients in progress: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko as a Qt telegram-like https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion as a Qt xchat-like https://github.com/manuroe/messagerie for instance is a SwiftUI client proof-of-concept that should work on macOS as well as iOS None are as polished as Riot functionalitywise, but we will get there eventually - even more so if people contribute.

In Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

Arathorn·May 13, 2019

Riot/iOS is already native, and works pretty well, so will likely evolve to behave more like RiotX as time goes on rather than getting rewritten. RiotX is trying to be something that starts off feeling like WhatsApp or Telegram, but can expand into IRC/Discord/Slack for powerusers. Who knows if it'll work. For native desktop apps, there are a bunch of other Matrix clients focused specifically on that domain - e.g. https://neilalexander.dev/seaglass and https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Fractal and https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko and https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion. Riot/iOS might expand into Riot/macOS though in future (although this is basically what Seaglass is already).

In A free XMPP server powered with green energy

dikiaap·Mar 21, 2018

Interesting! I don't know these native desktop client before. I will link it here: - nheko: https://github.com/mujx/nheko - Fractal: https://github.com/danigm/fractal - Quaternion: https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion

In Ask HN: Is it time to switch your acquaintances to Riot.im?

terraforming·Nov 1, 2017

Matrix is fantastic. However, riot desktop sucks in my opinion. Yet again, an electron app. You say that matrix "has excellent clients for all platforms". That is simply not true at this time. For linux, there's pretty much only 1 client that's currently usable, and that is riot (electron app). There's a fantastic one in the works, qmatrixclient (quaternion: https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion), but it doesn't support E2EE yet.

In Standalone Signal Desktop