Snikket is a distribution of Prosody. Personally I run Prosody with all sorts of different clients, and they all have been compatible with one another? e.g. on desktop I've tried Gajin, Pidgin, Dino, etc and never had a problem. What issue are you seeing specifically?
I was happy with Gajim, but dino.im is also a very cool and lean XMPP client.
XMPP is like eMail. eMail is also a mess. But it is federated and no one holds "the one power" to shut it down. Thats why i believe in XMPP as the best option. It's certainly not perfect and the fragmentation of servers and clients might make it slow and hard to innovate, but IMHO nothing else competes (Matrix is open too, but it feels not as open as XMPP to me... and i think it is overkill for most use cases).
EDIT, PS: i also use Signal for people who don't have XMPP... But i use it like once a week or so, while i use Conversations and dino countless times per day.