I noticed that cinnamon-desktop-environment recommends gtk2 apps. I
expect that the bugs for those apps will be raised to severity:
serious later this year and the apps eventually removed from Testing.

hexchat is unmaintained and archived upstream. https://bugs.debian.org/1120756

pidgin has a gtk4 version as a "pre-alpha" but it hasn't been packaged
even for Experimental yet. https://bugs.debian.org/883214 . My guess
is that Debian's pidgin could switch to this version in time for
Debian 14; whereas hexchat looks unlikely to be fixed.

I do not have a recommended alternative. Polari is a GNOME IRC app,
but it didn't work for me when I tried it this week. I assume that
Quassel works, but it's an app for KDE. (KDE also has Konversation for
IRC.) Empathy was a GNOME alternative to Pidgin but it was removed
from Debian years ago since it was abandoned and no longer worked.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha

Il 26/11/2025 21:20, Jeremy Bícha ha scritto:

About pidgin I don't use it and I haven't looked for alternatives. From
what I understood, years ago it was still quite widely used and had
plugins for many things. I'm not sure what the current situation is,
whether it's actually still widely used and quite good or if there are
better alternatives.

I still use Hexchat on a daily basis. I looked at alternatives a while
back, but they didn't seem good enough and/or I didn't have enough time
to do a thorough research. As far as I know, there are still other users
who use it regularly, even though it's no longer maintained upstream.
I've seen many forks with additional commits but none without
significant enough development. Unfortunately, I don't have enough time
to do further research anytime soon.

If someone have any suggestions for replacements (hopefully without
causing problems for users) or other changes to improve this
metapackage, they are welcome.

zoitechat is a gtk3 version of hexchat.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha