Do you have any alternatives? IRC? I use Matrix to communicate with friends so I'm stuck on it for now; I too am very unhappy with the overall UX and find it painful to use.
As mentioned in the comment you're replying to, Element is just one client for Matrix, and there are others like Fluffy Chat that might suit your tastes better. Try some other clients before giving up on Matrix.
I have tried a few others, but from further investigation the issue seems to be due in large part to Synapse being incredibly slow. If you watch /sync a few times in Element (initial syncs are even worse), the TTFB for /sync is incredible. On top of this, you have Element taking up gigabytes of RAM for seemingly nothing at all, so my laptop regularly kills it due to OOM (This could also be in part due to Flatpak shared libraries / sandbox bloat).
I'm very much hoping they will hurry up with Sync v3, which would make this protocol a hell of a lot easier to use (for me, and a lot of other people). Right now booting up Element (or any other Matrix client, this is really a protocol issue) feels like a major chore, and it's something I prefer to avoid if I can. This is also why I keep Telegram installed on both my mobile, desktop and laptop.
Aside from Element, there isn't really much choice on Linux anyway. Fractal is ancient and gets stuck at "Syncing", Nheko takes up gigabytes of memory on initial sync until OOM'd, FluffyChat doesn't really work on my desktop (neither does NeoChat, Quaternion, Spectral), etc. etc. If you name a Matrix client, I have most likely tried it before and it didn't work (aside from Fractal Next, which doesn't have a release yet FWICS).
I've also considered hosting some sort of XMPP service, then bridging my Matrix account to said service so I don't have to endure the poor UX of various Matrix clients. Then again I'm not sure how the end-to-end encryption would work with that, and I would like to keep that if possible.
I have never experienced (or had to endure) an app with such poor UX as Element. Nothing seems to work quite as it should, sometimes it just plainly refuses to work, and other times you get issues which have been reported multiple years ago to the Matrix team (and still have yet to be fixed).
At this point I am very worn out of having to use Matrix, however due to my moderational duties I have no other choice.
The Matrix team had already confirmed that e2ee with XMPP is a 'contradiction in terms'. That's one of the reasons why I believe working on improving existing Internet Standards is better than switching to another trendy, non-standard protocol.
> The Matrix team had already confirmed that e2ee with XMPP is a 'contradiction in terms'.
Ahh, thank you telling me. I guess that's off the cards then.
> That's one of the reasons why I believe working on improving existing Internet Standards is better than switching to another trendy, non-standard protocol.
As much as I hate to admit it, I totally agree with you. While I personally quite like the API's and SDK's (although the JS SDK is pants, I've worked with it before), the UX of the client(s) just don't feel there yet, compared to what alternatives are offering.
I love XMPP, but UX is a client-side concern, not a protocol problem (although some protocols make it easier/harder to have good UX). Both XMPP and Matrix could have great clients, although i personally find most Matrix clients to be more polished than XMPP clients (at the price of much higher resource usage for Element due to Javascript crap).
Some polished XMPP clients include dino/gajim (desktop) and conversations/siskin (android/iOS). If you're looking for a unified-brand client/server distribution, snikket.im is a pretty cool project and could use help and funding.