I just tried out Essence in a QEMU VM and it looks really good to me. All other apps work fine and seem to be quite stable, but IRC Client always crashes as soon as I hit the Connect button. I tried it with OFTC and Freenode. It also happens if I don't fill out the form at all. The error message says the following:

The application has crashed. If you're a developer, more information is available in System Monitor.

Hi, the IRC client is part of the very experimental networking stack which was written in a single week; I haven't looked at the code since then. I haven't tried using the IRC client in months so I'm not surprised that it doesn't work. In the future I'll probably be rewriting the networking stack and the IRC client, but this is currently not very high priority. I'm hoping to find some contributors who'll be able to help out with this.

Sorry.

I'm absolutely not experienced with C++, so I unfortunately can't help with getting this to work, but I'm very interested in networking features. I'll try it again when it works, no need to hurry, I'll just check every few weeks if there's something new.