IRC clients

[Wuzzy]

So, this kinda relates to FOSS games, very losely, but it mostly relates to FOSS in generall.

Many FOSS projects use IRC for chatting, and I think it's a good thing. However, I am concerned that current IRC clients are not exactly inviting to complete newbies. Current IRC clients are not that bad, but there's always something that just feels off, usability-wise. Either it's just feature-creep, or they are littered with awkward technical terms, or the widgets are arranged in a strange way, or the interface just looks ugly, etc.

So I am asking you which IRC client you would recommend for a complete beginner. So that I have something that FOSS projects can point their users to with peace-of-mind.

(This is not about a client for me. I do have a client and I'm happy with it, but I wouldn't recommend it to beginners because it has some obscure features.)

[Julius]

https://webchat.freenode.net/

Is probably the easiest. Works with KiwiIRCnext. But in regards to IRC webclients, both The Lounge and Convos are also good and easier to self-host than KiwiIRCNext.

On Android "Revolution IRC" is really nice, but IRC itself isn't that great on mobile connections. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.mrarm.irc/

On Linux Polari is really nice: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Polari

On legacy Windows, not sure (who in their right mind still uses that outdated stuff?), Quassel seems to have a port to that legacy OS: https://quassel-irc.org/

[Wuzzy]

Thank you.

Polari looks indeed very interesting as it's very very simple. Just select a network, enter a channel name and off you go! This is exactly how I imagined it how it should go. Great! I like that it has an emoji button (but no color). This really should become a standard feature all across the board nowadays. Sadly, it seems to be too GNOME-specific. While it doesn't seem to have a hard GNOME dependency (I believe), it carries the GNOME style with it. This probably wouldn't mix well with e.g. KDE. Anyway, it mostly looks like something that you can give to n00bs IF they have GNOME installed …
But I also found a SERIOUS usability problem: When I joined a voice-restricted channel without having voice and I tried to send a message, I received NO error at all. Worse: It even looks like I have successfully sent the message although nobody will receive the message. So basically if I'm voice-restricted on a channel, my message goes nowhere and I don't even know it! This is very bad. I'm not sure if this is a bug in the software or IRC-related, however. I know if I do the same thing in HexChat, I get a warning.

Webchat has the downside that it's usually only restricted to one network or even just one channel. But it's still useful to include in your website. But I think you cannot really compare webchat with standalone clients; those are more like two completely separate classes of IRC clients, as webchat is not something that users install for themselves. N00bs will certainly not “self-host” webchat.

I can't say much about the rest.

[Evropi]

I agree the easiest is a simple webchat link with Kiwi.

For the desktop ones, I think HexChat is certainly the most approachable on Windows and Linux.

For mobile, I honestly never found a great, friendly client.

Honestly, I think it's the protocol's fault. Persistence is needed. But virtually no server allows it for mere users. There's also a lot of hacky, legacy nonsense to it. I don't think there can ever be a truly friendly IRC client.

I kinda still like IRC but only because it's WeeChat's default, and WeeChat is a stunningly good program. WeeChat isn't bound to IRC and can support other protocols, though obviously IRC is a first class citizen and others (like Matrix or XMPP) aren't.

My suggestion: if you're starting a new project, think beyond IRC. And if you have a very geeky community, at least have an IRC bridge to another protocol instead of straight up IRC.

[Julius]

My suggestion: if you're starting a new project, think beyond IRC. And if you have a very geeky community, at least have an IRC bridge to another protocol instead of straight up IRC.

While I agree that NickServ is a pain, IRC has the interesting "feature" that it is so simple that it can act well as a minimal interoperability system. If I wouldn't have the stability issues on my server right now (which for some reason only show up with IRC servers) I would probably set it up without direct client access (other than a locked down web-client) and use it for really nice bridging and bot integrations only.

[Lyberta]

Deleted.