Better than mIRC?

Well I use Trillian, but that’s only really worth considering if you already use Trillian for other media. Otherwise X-Chat and bersirc are good popular clients (I’d go for the first). If you use several networks at a time you should seriously consider the somewhat more obscure HydraIRC.

Obviously, I would recommend Klient, being a registered Klient user, but I understand not everyone wants to pay for an IRC client (no matter how great it is) – but definately, take the 30 day trial; it’s well worth the IRC experience…

On a side note, I don’t recommend the use of HydraIRC… The only good thingsabout HydraIRC are that it can be run from a CD with no install on the actual machine you’re using it on and it loads nice and quickly (due to lack of features)… Other than that, it’s highly buggy (simply closing a connected server window can cause it to crash), incomplete (there’s absolutely no scripting, not to mention many missing features standard to IRC), and their support community is awful (if you don’t agree with them, they’ll often just insult you until you leave)…