HACKER Q&A
📣 apatheticonion

Recommendations for an alternative native chat client? (Slack, Discord)


Looking for a native desktop chat client that consolidates other chat applications into a single, efficient, native desktop client.

It's okay if it's _only_ an alternative client for Slack (as that's the one I use the most), but support for other services would be awesome too.

Happy to pay for this, Linux support would be ideal.

Any ideas?


  👤 wkat4242 Accepted Answer ✓
As some others have said, matrix is great at this.

I use this ansible playbook to set it all up: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy it supports slack and discord too. There's not a lot it doesn't support actually, it's very good. The one thing I miss a bit is running multiple bridges of the same type on the same account (I have two WhatsApp and telegram numbers for example)

You can also use beeper which is hosted if you don't want to self host. Costs $10 a month. They employ one of the major bridge Devs so they know what they're doing. It's not to be confused with the recent beeper mini that's just for iMessage.

There's also element one from the Devs of matrix but they don't support all services you're looking for.

And yes native clients are available for matrix.


👤 btdmaster
https://cancel.fm/ripcord/

Used it before, worked OK. Now I use Matrix, so I don't need it anymore.

Neat trick: AppImages are squashfs compressed filesystems, so they can have slow startup etc. Fix this with ./app.AppImage --appimage-extract, find the binary in the created folder and run that one instead, so that you pay the decompression cost only once.


👤 palata
I just stick with IRC. Comes with tons of clients, even convoluted ElectronJS ones for those who are nostalgic of Slack.

👤 smoldesu
I've had fairly good results using gtkcord4, though it takes it little finagling to get up-and-running: https://github.com/diamondburned/gtkcord4

👤 coldtrait
So, not an alternative but an app that lets you integrate Slack?