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The web interface to Twitter seems to do things in the background that slow down my browser considerably. I'm not curious enough to investigate the root causes. So, I tried some other Twitter clients.
Twitux
Site: https://live.gnome.org/DanielMorales/Twitux
My experience:
- apt-get install twitux worked fine
- twitux started with no problems
- Using the correct userid and password, on 'connect' twitux just says 'access denied'. No further information, no way around it, no messages, no log, no help, no known bugs, no mention on the website.
- apt-get remove twitux worked fine
Choqok
Site: http://choqok.gnufolks.org/
My experience:
- Per the website, choqok is specifically for the K desktop, which I don't use.
- End of experiment.
Destroy Twitter
Site: http://destroytwitter.com/
My experience:
- Requires Adobe Air, no longer supported for Linux.
- End of experiment.
Mitter
Site: http://code.google.com/p/mitter/
My experience:
- There are no installation instructions. I unpacked the distribution tarball and saw that it looked like a Python thing. I created a directory for it and ran 'sudo python setup.py install'. Worked fine.
- Unity launcher could not find mitter.
- In Terminal, I ran 'python mitter' and it started with some warning-level errors.
- Tried to connect to Twitter using the correct credentials and got an authentication error.
That's the second product I've tried that gave me a login error with correct credentials for Twitter. I followed up to be really sure I was using the right login credentials. I was. I found comments online that suggest some clients get a 401 even when they aren't passing anything incorrectly. Offhand that doesn't seem like an especially useful feature.
TweetDeck
Site: http://www.tweetdeck.com
My experience:
- Requires Adobe Air, no longer supported for Linux.
- End of experiment.
Gwibber
Site: https://launchpad.net/gwibber
My experience:
- I vaguely recall having used Gwibber in the past. I gave it a try to see if it could connect to Twitter successfully.
- Seems to work okay. This means the other clients have problems with authentication. Too bad. Some of the screen shots looked nicer than Gwibber.
- I used Gwibber for a few minutes but did not like the interface. I found it hard to open up threads of replies.
- In Gwibber's favor, it was the first Twitter client I tried today that was actually able to connect to Twitter. I had assumed that would be a basic requirement for a Twitter client, but apparently it is an optional feature. That's what I get for assuming.
gTwitter
Site: http://code.google.com/p/gtwitter/
My experience:
- When I attempted to visit the website I got a 403 with the message, "Your client does not have permission to get URL /p/gtwitter/ from this server. That’s all we know." I interpret the response to mean the authors of gTwitter don't want me to try it. Okay. Didn't.
Qwit
Site: http://code.google.com/p/qwit/
My experience:
- Qwit installed easily, no problems and no errors.
- After I set up my account information, it appeared to do nothing at all. I tried the various connection options it offers, and it never seemed to take any action at all. It gives no indication that it has attempted to log in or communicate at all. None of the icons on the UI does anything. There is no menu, no help, no tooltips, no console messages, no log that I could find. As far as I can tell, Qwit doesn't do anything.
- I qwit.
Hotot
Site: http://hotot.org/
My experience:
- The website claims a stable version is available in the default Ubuntu repository. This proved to be untrue.
- I installed it with
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hotot-team sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install hotot
- Seems to work okay. A little clunky when it opens a web page in response to a mouse click within its own UI, but it does function, and it solves (or gets around) the immediate problem I was having with browser slow-down using the web interface to Twitter. Not very good, but usable for the time being.