The Best Linux Twitter Clients

If you thought microblogging using Twitter and Identica was as simple as tapping out 140 characters once a day describing what kind of food you just ate, you'd be wrong. In fact, there's a huge amount of functionality to help you follow and be followed online, and if you're a Linux user you're spoiled for choice.

Spaz
A simple single-column interface packs in all the things you're likely to need for ordinary tweeting. A row of icons across the top give quick access to features like searching, global feed and your friends list with a menu for other options such as changing the settings or uploading an image. The messages themselves are accompanied by avatars and a mouse over will reveal the user's profile. Context-driven icons follow the message, allowing retweets, replies and messaging, though by default these just follow the test rather than being arranged in a consistent place.



DestroyTwitter
As for features, this is certainly a middleweight. All the usual things you might expect are here, and most are well implemented - it has the neatest slide-up conversation viewer of all the apps, even if the button to activate it is almost sub-pixel small. Multiple shorteners and picture services are supported (though not TwitPic for some reason), and practically everything you might want to click on is clickable, though in most cases this just enables you to send links to a browser.


Twitux
Never mind lists, groups, photo uploads, multiple accounts, URL shortening, translations, conversation tracking or any of that, Twitux doesn't even stretch to retweets. You can reply to your friends, you can follow new ones if you happen to know their username and want to type it in manually. There's no searching, no filtering - in fact, whatever life-savingly useful feature you can think of, it isn't here, OK? You do get a pleasant and readable Twitter feed. You can read and send direct messages. That's pretty much about it though.



Gwibber
It isn't all doom and gloom though. Clicking on an avatar will quickly open a new tab with a list of that user's posts. Perhaps because the interface is simpler and more direct than the Air-based clients, things do seem to happen almost instantaneously (assuming a good network connection). Tabbed displays can show the results of searches or individual timelines for users (just click on the username).



Choqok
Choqok also gets points simply for being a native Linux application. Its menus, fonts, buttons and general behaviour are all familiar (well, if you run any KDE apps anyway), which in many ways makes it easier to use, and certainly makes it fit well into a Linux desktop. Being published under a proper open source licence helps immensely too - although it doesn't affect the functionality, it is reassuringly transparent and open when it comes to the handling of your own personal data.



TweetDeck
For all that, there are things it doesn't do. There is no theming to speak of, both styles of the update notification are large and obtrusive, the icons are often just a little on the small side, and if you use Identica or Laconica, there's no way to add these servers.



Mitter
Mitter currently eschews the more complex features demanded by the frequent-posting twitterati, but isn't quite as pared to the bone as other clients. While you don't get a choice in the service it uses, it does support URL shortening, for instance. There is no transparent decoding of short URLs, nor are they directly clickable, but right-clicking on a tweet does give the option to follow any links, which will open in your default browser.



Mixero
Although it doesn't explicitly support Identica, you can change the server address and therefore support any Twitter-compatible server. It's also possible to add multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, although it becomes a little difficult to manage them effectively.


Choqok
TweetDeck is the software with the greatest number of features crammed into it. It's been designed well enough to offer all this functionality without being too difficult to use, but it is a bit of a screen hog - to get the best out of it you'll need to dedicate a desktop to it, which might be a bit much for any but the most dedicated Tweeters. We also have a funny taste in our mouth over having to register to get some of the functionality, as well as the general un-Linuxyness of it all.

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