A new IRC client (but don't call it an IRC client) is being developed by Linux Mint:
The Ubuntu-based distro currently includes Hexchat in its default software set. IRC isn't as trendy as Discord or Telegram but it is a free, open standard that no single entity controls, is relatively low-bandwidth, interoperable, and efficient.
But as I reported in February: Hexchat is no more.
Hexchat quitting the chat leaves —I so badly want to type leafs there— Linux Mint with a dilemma and an opportunity.
The dilemma being: "should we continue shipping an IRC client, and what role does it serve?" and the opportunity being: "could we replace it with something better?".
[...] Ever wondered why Linux Mint comes with an IRC client preinstalled? It's mainly to offer a way for users of the distro to talk to, ask questions, and get support from other users of the distro in (relative) real time.
[...] Since its official IRC channels remain active, with users and developers using them daily to answer questions, offer support, and connect over a shared interest, should the demise of Hexchat have to mean moating of IRC entirely?
As is, IRC isn't user-friendly. It's a kind of an arcane magic involving strange commands. Its onboarding is obtuse. And the protocol doesn't natively support things like media sharing (screenshots are useful when troubleshooting), clickable links, or other modern "niceties".
And yet, IRC is a fast, established, open, and versatile protocol. It's not as flashy as Discord but it's not encumbered by superfluous social excesses or corporate caveats. It's free and immediate (no sign-up required to use it) which makes it ideal for 'when you need it' use.
So work has begun on a new dedicated "chat room" app to replace Hexchat, called Jargonaut.
Linux Mint's goal is not to build a fully-featured IRC client, or even an IRC client at all. Jargonaut is a chat app that just happens to use IRC as its underlying chat protocol.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 17, @11:56PM (10 children)
Does software cease to function if nobody is working on it?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by julian on Monday March 18, @12:51AM (9 children)
Disregarding that there are still outstanding bugs, and new ones will surely be found in the future, there is a minimal amount of work required to keep software working as operating systems, frameworks, and computer hardware changes. Anyone who has ever tried to play an old PC game on a new computer knows this. Something as old and feature-complete as an IRC client is probably not *that* much work, but someone still has to do it. I expect someone will step up and fork HexChat (itself a fork of XChat) but it could be a while. In the meantime it's probably perfectly safe to keep using it.
I would actually welcome something new with modern quality of life improvements and a more accessible interface. I hate Discord because it's horribly bloated (Electron) and proprietary. I wish we had something that was leaner, FLOSS, but with a similar feature set and experience. Sounds like that's exactly what the Mint team is going for.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 18, @01:43AM
We call it bit rot.
There are various levels of corrosion resistance depending on the tools you use to build your software. Something like a mostly self-contained C/C++ API will generally continue to re-compile successfully with successive generations of gcc for a long time - maybe with more warnings as the years go on. Some straight C code I wrote 20+ years ago still compiles and runs the same today in Ubuntu 23.10 as it did in Cygwin back then. Call that "stainless steel" level corrosion resistance, not perfect, but very long lasting in most environments.
The more packages you bring in, the faster you're going to experience bit rot as the various packages drift out of compatibility with each other.
If you want to experience bit rot more on the "cardboard left out in the rain" level, my suggestion is to write software for deployment on iOS and Android.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by https on Monday March 18, @04:37AM (6 children)
More confusing is why write a new app to do IRC when hexchat is literally right there wanting to be maintained.
Forget nicotine, NIH sydrome is the most powerfully addictive drug.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by julian on Monday March 18, @05:46AM
HexChat is a fine IRC client. I use it, along with Irssi. I hope someone picks it up and starts maintaining it again. It's never going to be more than an IRC client. There are a lot of features and improvements in the domain of "chat rooms" that we've figured out over the decades since the IRC standard was created and it would be good for the FLOSS community and the Internet at large if there was a non-proprietary competitor to the likes of Discord.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday March 18, @07:59AM (4 children)
There may be an element of NIH present, but their proposal is for a simple discussion system than can also display images (photos, memes. circuit diagrams, whatever) and a few other vague enhancements. It seems to me that they have set out not to improve IRC but to build something to compete with it, including additional bells and whistles.
So it is not a trivial project and there is no explanation as to how their new baby will compete with various other social media formats. From what I have read - it won't.
I am not optimistic about the final outcome.
TFA doesn't make things any clearer:
answer:
I suspect they are looking at CrapGPT or something similar as a replacement for this function.
Next:
answer:
keep the 'arcane' commands but provide a simple UI which even their own community can use easily. (Perhaps I am expecting a little too much here.) Media sharing would be a nice enhancement - we have to have the ability to transfer pron (and cats) easily to attract the punters. No 'clickable links'? I use HexChat and we exchange links (stories, submissions, youtube videos, comic strips) every day. They are not using it properly I guess, but mouse clicks are perhaps a difficult thing for some people to master,
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Monday March 18, @12:41PM (3 children)
> to build something to compete with it, including additional bells and whistles.
Not necessarily. For example one can implement IRC client to embed images in the chat when posting links to an image (rather than loading a browser page). Most clients already implement gui interfaces to handle simple commands like whois and msg. Would be not crazy to implement a few other things on the same lines. How about an inline markup interpreter? I like the whatsapp implementation of having my text left aligned and other text right aligned (possibly with a separate background colour).
Lots of things can be built on IRC without changing the underlying messaging protocol.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Unixnut on Monday March 18, @03:36PM
More to the point, why try to force that level of stuff onto IRC?
IRC was designed as text only communication, and while you can hack at the protocol to make it do other stuff, why reinvent the wheel when XMPP/Jabber [wikipedia.org] is already an open protocol standard that supports all they want (and more)?
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday March 18, @03:58PM (1 child)
Yes, you are correct.
But my concern is that the new system CANNOT exist without somebody being employed to moderate and manage it. Today's IRC is not owned or controlled by anyone. I think that this is a good thing. However, If somebody can send an image to anyone they wish, how long will it be before 'dick pics' start appearing on the screen entirely unsolicited? Of course, that does happen with much of today's social media which is why we have the problem that we do. The governments (various, they all do it) want such sites moderated and controlled to prevent these things from happening. I don't suppose the same governments will be happy if anyone tries to use encryption either.
Today's IRC is largely ignored by those who like interfering with anything that might indicate people enjoying themselves. Not having images directly available (although there are usable alternatives) makes it far less likely that anyone will be very concerned about it. Anyone today can use IRC. Is there a social media site (apart from our own!) where potential users are not asked to give their life history, bank account details and inside leg measurement before they can join?
What is being suggested is nothing like IRC and is much more akin to yet another social media site (YASMS). It might use the same protocol but I'll bet it doesn't stay that way. It appears that it will have the same problems too. IRC is very lightweight but the proposed system will be somewhat 'heavier'. Media sharing? Do they mean more TikTok videos? So those people who haven't got multi-megabyte download speeds (and there are millions of them!) will once again find themselves being left out. Universities are content to provide free computing power to maintain IRC yet I do not think that they will be as willing when it comes to hosting a social media site with all the extra storage that it will require and the legal obligations that will go with it.
IMO, there are already plenty of social media sites, and I am sure yet more will be along very soon too. Fine, those that want them can use them. I think that this initiative is not quite what is being suggested. Would it really be that difficult to either support HexChat or find another IRC client that they are happy with?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday March 19, @08:44AM
Good point, though there are a couple of differences:
* IRC chat is ephemeral, whereas twitface and friendface are not.
* IRC server may not host images and chat data (depending on the implementation)
The better comparison is WhatsApp, which is not moderated (although some governments are trying to force that in using Artificial Stupidity).
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday March 18, @03:42PM
I would like to challenge that statement and claim the opposite. Unless you encapsulate your work and keep around old libraries you are in a constant migration requiring more or less work. The games you mention are actually a good example, let's say dos games. You can emulate the environment just fine but running them on a modern version of any OS requires a rewrite. In my experience even the emulation, say Wine, sucks, only full hardware emulation works.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dwilson on Monday March 18, @12:09AM (4 children)
I wish them the best of luck. The world needs a decent chat app, to compete with the likes of Discord. Discord is crap, but it's shiny and easy to use, so it dominates. Still not sure how they make any money off it, and keep it free for so many people. Probably best I don't know.
I never did use IRC very heavily, but it served it's purpose, and it's a shame it's been displaced. Ditto for federated jabber, to this day I still strongly suspect that Blizzard's Battle.net chat system, and Steam's, use forked jabber under the hood.
As for voice chat, I still remember the days of Roger Wilco over a 14.4k dial up link, playing UO. In that space, Mumble kicked the shit out of everyone when it was released, as far as I'm concerned. Teamspeak and Ventrillo were crap in comparison. But Discord displaced them all, too.
Anyone who can make a Discord clone, using forks/extensions of the old stand-by open protocols like IRC and whatever Mumble used, and package it up modern and shiny (withOUT Electron!) will get my vote. I'll even vote with my dollar.
And then never talk to anyone, because it'll never catch on, just like most of the better solutions to technical problems. Sigh.
- D
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 18, @12:38AM
>Discord is crap, but it's shiny and easy to use, so it dominates. Still not sure how they make any money off it, and keep it free for so many people. Probably best I don't know.
Only place I've been exposed to Discord is as a game adjunct. In those game adjunct Discord channels I see a LOT of users who appear to be paying for premium features. That probably varies a lot by the types of users you have, but the gamers I met don't seem to have a problem tossing some coin in exchange for a custom avatar and similar things.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Monday March 18, @01:47AM
They have a subscription service, its own game store, they partner with various companies to offer special promotions and deals, and sell branded merchandise like t-shirts and stuff.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 18, @01:49AM
> The world needs a decent chat app
Gnu offers https://jami.net/ [jami.net] Seemed to work well the time I tried it. From that page:
(Score: 2, Interesting) by aebonyne on Monday March 18, @05:49PM
Matrix [wikipedia.org] is the project to look at for an open competitor to Discord/Slack. It has similar abstractions from the user point of view (text/voice channels, communities) and is federated. I haven't tried it in a while, but it's under active development, so hopefully getting more polished over time.
Centralization breaks the internet.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Tork on Monday March 18, @02:05AM
I dunno about you all but I think the year of Linux on the Desktop is right around the corner!
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 19, @02:04PM
Plan for world domination with IRC
1. Create an open internet chat protocol so that anybody can provide the service using any one of a number of servers that implement the standard
2. Make it so people can use it with any of a number of clients that implement the standard
3. People do not have to register or provide any personal information when using the service
4. Profit???
If everybody weren't greedily trying to grab as big a piece of the pie as possible they would simply extend the protocol to allow media uploads. It would be a lot easier than creating a whole new protocol from scratch plus server plus clients and it would build the community rather than trying to coral us into pens like cattle.
The other issues mentioned, arcane commands and non-clickable links. Those are both client issues. The user can easily be separated from the complexity of IRC commands by their client. The fact that more advanced users can still use the commands, that's a feature not a bug. Clickable links? I have that already in my terminal so most terminal based clients should have it out the box unless they do something to break it. Implementing it in a GUI or web frontend would be trivial. That said, it's an annoying "feature". It makes it harder to select it to copy and paste which, as someone who runs multiple browser instances and often wants to open a link in a specific (not the default) browser, is something I do more than clicking.