I recommend Franz (http://meetfranz.com/). Does Whatsapp, works on Linux, mac, pc. Supports Slack, WeChat, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, GroupMe and Skype.
I think you're reading a bit too much into his comment. It's true that the phrasing can seem dismissive, but I don't think it's meant as such to that extreme of a degree.
It being a collection of wrappers is either true or not and is not necessarily a value judgment, but a technical detail.
Wow that's cool. This seems to be the spiritual successor to Adium (maybe Pidgin, not sure if that's still active).
Edit: Tried it out. It's visually pretty but it wouldn't even let me add my Slack account (we use SSO, maybe they haven't updated for that). And then when I clicked the Send Email to Franz, the email was prepopulated with some social "download franz!" message.
It takes zero effort to package Electon apps for Linux, there are plenty of tools available that will package it for all platforms with one command.
And so far, I've not seen any differences or platform specific bugs.
Sure, you'd expect a big company like WhatsApp to do QA testing on every platform they release for, but it's a shame that even with the barrier of entry is so negligibly low, that they still won't provide a Linux build. Even if it's just for the latest Ubuntu LTS that's fine, other distros can repackage it themselves.
