Twitter is without doubt one of the most popular micro-blogging/social networking services out there on the web. Even though the use of the Twitter website is very much sufficient to enjoy a good Twitter experience, various 3rd party Twitter clients exist to make things more easy and streamlined.

Most of the popular clients are cross-platform and are based on Adobe AIR, like in the case of TweetDeck and DestroyTwitter and are very popular especially with Windows users. Linux on the other hand has its own breed of clients that aren’t very well-known as their Windows and Mac counterparts. Today we’re are going to have a look at two alternative Twitter clients for Linux -  Turpial and Hotot.

Ubuntu usually ships with Gwibber, a micro-blogging client preinstalled. It has all the features you need to manage Twitter, Facebook and Identi.ca all in the same place. If you’re just plain tired with using Gwibber you might want to look at some other alternatives that provide all the necessary features and more. The Ubuntu Software Center has a few apps but they have a lot of shortcomings, which made me move into these two which do not feature in the software center.

Hotot

Hotot supports both Twitter and Identi.ca and is very much my favourite Twitter client on Linux. It has a user-interface that you may fall in love with and a rich set of features that complement it. Hotot uses an access token to securely log into Twitter and supports an expandable set of extensions.

The default Hotot extensions include location tagging, image uploading, URL shortening, Tweet translation and video preview features. It also includes a very advanced content firewall that can be configured to blacklist or whitelist certain users or content using custom user rules.

Apart from a few language errors Hotot doesn’t have any major drawback to be talked about.

You can visit their website at Hotot for downloads for different Linux distributions, or you can simply run the following commands in a terminal window to install Hotot in Ubuntu.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hotot-team
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hotot

Turpial

Turpial is a micro-blogging client comparable to TweetDeck, with the exception being that it solely concentrates on Twitter alone. It’s written in Python and has all the critical features required while being light and fast. Turpial has built in image tweeting and URL shortening features together with a host of URL shortening services to choose from. The user-interface is very simple but intuitive with the ability to quickly change between default feeds such as Mentions and Direct Messages and user defined lists.

Turpial has a handy Mute feature that can quickly block displaying updates from certain users from your feeds without unfollowing them. Support for a Twitter API proxy and custom browsers are also present. The only drawback I experienced was that the initial startup/login was a bit slow compared to other similar clients.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:effie-jayx/turpial
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install turpial

You can visit their site Turpial (in Spanish) or run the following in an Ubuntu terminal window.