Unlike discord,and some other messaging platforms,IRC has a relativelysimple protocal that makes it trivial to create a client for it

Because of this,theres alot of clients to pick from,some have lost support over the years sadly

But the main ones for desktop are kvirc,hexchat(out of support as of now),MIrc(paid,but still supports windows xp),Irssi

Sadly the mobile space has far fewer options,hexdroid is one of the better ones for android but IOS doesn't have any good free ones,at least as of the time of writing this

Most clients tend to have a fairly long list of built in servers to connect to but if its missing the one you plan to use or your using a znc you'll have to add a new network and set it up manually

The main things to keep in mind is that some networks may be using self signed certificates(Like mine) or might just lack them outright,so if connecting initially doesn't work try looking for a option to either disable ssl and switch to a plain text port,or tell the client to allow invalid certs

If your planning to connect to a bouncer make sure that you have it configured right in the case of ZNC it should look something like this

NICK>USERNAME

INDENT>USERNAME/SERVERNAME

SERVER PASS>PASSWORD

This part is optional but if you have a spotty network connection or you plan to use irc on a laptop or a phone where you'll lose connection often its recommended

Like the client theres a few of them,and theres also the option of writing your own(but honestly I wouldn't) I've only tried ZNC so thats the one I'm going to recommend but if someone knows a better one feel free to leave a msg