My laptop is getting old and i can’t have Element eat up half of my RAM. There are many more clients out there but which one is good? aka "the best? ;-)
My requirements: lightweight, encryption 100% supported, active development/community. runs neatly 24/7 in the background.
Should also support the latest features, let me customize when to get notifications: priorities / muted chatrooms. And ideally also look clean and run on the Pinephone. But that’s optional.
I don’t care which desktop environment or cli.
What do you use?
Two of the top answers here are missing from that list and, to be frank, that list does not really contain any useful information. For example, where do I see on that list which clients can display images?
You just click on the links and go to their pages… This is literally such little effort dude.
I was specifically asking for recommendations by actual humans. I didn’t write a lengthy essay about all of my previous life but I’m pretty aware of that list and even tried several clients but never found anything I fell in love with.
You sometimes simply (and politely) ask other people. And you learn. The main benefits are: You get real-world info. There are several clients out there that are only good ‘in theory’ but are lacking in every day use. And second, if you get the answer that everyone is happy with something and you’re the only one with a certain problem, you get to learn that you do something wrong or have a weird use-case.
You don’t get that info from that list. And how would I even do this? Start a spreadsheet with the 19 mentioned clients, have 20 features I need and go through the source code to see what’s implemented for every client that hasn’t a proper list on their github Readme? How long would that take me? And then install all the 20 clients and measure their resource usage or infer it from the programming language/framework? No, no. Sometimes asking people is just the way. And word-of-mouth is exceptionally good when you’re directly speaking with people and recommending them some distro or good piece of software out of the hundreds of possible choices.
I’m sorry for being a bit rude myself. My main point was just to explain myself.