Can you recommend a lightweight matrix chat client to me?
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.
At this point, it would be insane to classify it as a text editor only. I personally refer to it as the "Emacs distribution"; a distribution that happens to have its own integrated text editor and other useful tools. But a more accurate description is, Emacs is an e-lisp interpreter and because of this it's a very extensible tool!
I was using NeoChat for a while, but IIRC it doesn't support encrypted historical messages, so you'd have to get it set up and keep element around for searching history...
NeoChat has the benefit of supporting OIDC which my server uses exclusively, otherwise I would have given Fractal a look as well.
Thanks. I'm halfway through installing all of you people's recommendations. I'm a bit disappointed in the way encryption is handled in matrix. I'm again running into issues. gomuks gives me its fingerprint but element doesn't do that kind of verification any more. Guess I have to try more client until I find one that combines all kinds of verifications and I can get encryption set up and connected between them.
I don't think it will meet all your requirements (besides being light-weight), but I've been using weechat-matrix for a week and it's been fine. Without this, I wouldn't use matrix at all.
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?
8GB on my laptop but shared with a modern browser with 500 tabs open, an editor(/IDE), mail-client and whatever gnome likes to waste resources on (gnome-shell, gnome-software in the background etc). that accumulates to a bit less than 5GB. Plus whatever i currently need open to work on. And a computer needs a bit spare to buffer/cache things.
The pinephone has 3GB of RAM.
It's not nothing. But also not enough to have every other application written in Flutter.
Only using Android for socials and only tried element. I want something different. Element has a settings overload, but no way to remove the status bar icon. I hate that so much I just leave it disabled in settings unless I need to use it.
what do you mean by status bar icon? if you mean the persistent notification, it's so element isn't killed by android and can receive push notifications without google play services
Yeah. I like my home screen like Gnome's DE; nothing on it whatsoever. I only want my 3 button navigation, clock, WiFi status and battery. Absolute fine grain control over my notifications is very important to me. I'm extremely burned out on notifications used for user attention manipulation on the google framework. I an on Graphene with no google services. I only want notifications if they can be default opt-in and primarily peer to peer for things like DM. I don't want any visual indicator for such background services. Basically, I expect SMS like functionality; out of sight, out of mind until needed.