Matrix clients

software, communication, matrix

With temperatures climbing to record heights, and me waiting for the final CI jobs to finish so I can release Arbor v0.7, I thought I might revisit Matrix again. One of the reasons for switching the Arbor community over to Gitter, is the fact that it became accessible over Matrix, our last best hope for peace non Big Tech, open communication. One thing stands in the way of me using it instead of the Gitter web interface, and that is this.

Besides that, I tried a few clients a year ago or so, and was not impressed. Many clients were quite buggy and crashy. I settled on Quaternion, but it does not support the then new “Spaces” feature, nor E2EE. The recent news that Element comes with builtin (video)chat support now (soon without passing through jit.si), I thought I’d check the options out again.

I like snappy C++/Qt apps, but those options all have UI issues (plus a lack of E2EE in some cases). That leaves Cinny and Element at this time. Cinny is visually the best option to my taste, so I’ll stick with it for now. There no mobile version of it (not that I’m interested in that right now), and I hope when Element merges “Element Call” other clients won’t lag too much behind.