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.