… and I can’t even continue the chat from my phone.
Such is the state of Electron.
I’m slowly stopping to care about web apps, however the amount of shit Electron causes is through the roof. Discord, Element, Signal, even Steam is full of it, so you just end up having 8 different “programs” running with every single one using at least around 400MB of RAM.
Can’t wait to see something using Rust and Tauri. Graphite wink winkSteam is close but actually not electron, they use CEF - Chromium Embedded Framework which is something Electron uses too under the hood (afair)
Thanks for the correction, appreciate it. Not sure it changes much though.
Steam used an embedded browser long before it was cool.
Electron doesn’t use CEF, they directly bundle Chromium.
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I use a whole bunch of Linux distros at work (CentOS, alpine, ubuntu, debian, opensuse) and a bunch on my devices at home (mint, fedora, nobara, and manjaro), and so far the only distro I’ve seen ship decoupled shared electron libs like you described is Manjaro (and presumably Arch).
I wouldn’t mind so much if they all just used the same bundle of stuff, and you could install that once, and then the apps were all like 2MB each.
But no, big fucking bundle of shit, every single time.
Eh, that’s not the joy you think it is.
That’s how software used to be distributed and that’s where the terms DLL / Dependency Hell come from and why programs used to not uninstall cleanly and break other programs, etc.
It’s more efficient, but it’s also brittler and a lot more complex to manage. Conversely, bundling everything together with all its dependencies is a lot easier to manage, and a lot more robust overall, but comes at the expense of storage capacity and network bandwidth.
I really want to see the zygote approach worked out for electron. It’s working really well for android but with electron there are just too many different versions used by the different programs for that to make sense.
Of the apps you mentioned, I can use Discord and Element in my browser. WhatsApp even installs as a PWA. And Steam games can be launched through Lutris afaik?
There is no such option with Signal though.
With Discord in browser, you lose Krisp, RPC ipc socket support (aRPC might work, no clue), and from what I remember screensharing only worked with browser tab capture.
Element will eat your RAM no matter where it’s running. You could add it as a Nextcloud app to triple your RAM usage! Woo
And you can’t run Steam games without the Steam client running. That’s how their DRM works. (Unless you use the goldberg steam emulator, which is a whole another thing to talk about)
Can’t wait to see something using Rust and Tauri.
What about sciter?
The inability to continue chat from phone is a feature.
New messages will show on all your devices, but yes, it is intentional that old messages are not available to new devices.
This is because they don’t retain your (encrypted) messages on their servers right? Is this for storage reasons, or more just security philosophy of not being able to access past chats when you login from elsewhere?
Correct
But if I reply on the phone will it populate the desktop chat and vice versa?
The chat continues on all linked devices from the point in time that they are linked.
Imagine two people having a face-to-face conversation, then a third person walks up and joins in. The third person doesn’t know what was said before they joined the conversation, but all three continue the conversation from that point on.
Linked devices are like the above example, if two of those people were married and tell each other every conversation they’ve had since their wedding.
There is no reason why the message sync that works from phone to phone could not be implemented on the desktop client as well.
Does it work phone to phone? I was under the impression that a backup restore was needed if you wanted previous messages. It’s really an unnecessary security risk to have previous message sync. Someone gets your phone in their hand for 20 seconds, links your device and they get every message you have ever sent? No bueno.
You can sync messages from phone to phone. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages#android_transfer
Any new client doesn’t get old messages. Phone only allows the possibility of transferring a backup, which desktop doesn’t have.
I haven’t actually synced a new phone to Signal, does everything just carry over? I assumed you needed to transfer your account from phone to phone, not just link a new device.
Yes
Okay, but can’t it be an optional feature? I’d like it if a new device could download message history from an old device by having both online at the same time.
Optional how so? It’s a rotating key. Unless you have all of those keys to export into your computer, then you’ll be stuck with the current synced key.
You can still push old message history from your main device to your other devices, you can re-encrypt
No shit. I’ll need to look into this. Thanks for learning me up.
Matrix does it this way
Inability.
Unabilifiedness
Thanks
410mb for chat app seems very unoptimized
Hey now, the three React Native for Windows apps would be very offended if they were stable enough to read text input.
wait till you meet Line 😶
It’s because it’s an electron app. So in addition to the chat app itself, it also includes a full Chromium runtime. Worse still, the Electron architecture doesn’t really lend itself towards reusing electron itself; this means you might have several copies of the same version of electron on your machine for various apps.
People complain about the sizes of things like flatpaks and snaps, but tbh the whole architecture of applications is like this these days. Ironically, flatpaks and snaps could help with this because their formats can work decently with filesystem level deduplication.
Signal’s desktop app is as horrendously unusably bad as the project as a whole is good, tbh.
It’s no wonder people prefer stuff like Telegram. It has native apps and all. Or can be used in a browser. Meanwhile Signal is only used in a browser, but you have to download it and it fucks up font scaling and it shits the bed on font antialiasing and it can’t even get UI design consistent with the OS it’s running on and it won’t even use the OS emoji font.
Let’s not even mention how you still cannot use Signal on a tablet.
Yeah, I was going to say that I’ve used Signal on my Linux laptop and it’s janky af
Signal’s desktop app is as horrendously unusably bad
I think this is a bit dramatic. I’ve been using it for years, no problems.
For the most part, I don’t care about App Size. Storage is cheap. What I miss with the Signal Desktop App is the option to save everything in an encrypted container.
Same. I’ve seen the alternative called dependency hell too often… Yes, you can.share stuff between apps, but then, versioning is a nightmare.
Wouldn’t having full disk encryption achieve most of the benefits of that? In case of someone having access to your unlocked machine what is stopping them from launching the app and looking though it?
Yes, full disk encryption helps against intruders with device access, but not against the files being indexed by other application. My phone is encrypted, but I still use a signal client that is encrypted again.
Am encrypted container doesn’t help if the directory is mounted and accessible or if the key is in plaintext. Also doesn’t help if the process isn’t isolated. You need a bunch of extra measures like using the OS keystore set to only allow the correct program to retrieve the key, keeping secrets only in process memory, etc.
Tldr it’s a lot of work to do it right. If you do it the simple way like throwing it all in SQLite with encryption active you still leak metadata.
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I have never worked on a properly hardened desktop app, so I don’t have much of a perspective on that, and can definitely see that it might not be worthwhile for the signal team.
I would appreciate some level of encryption, thinking that it might help with less targeted attacks. I’d also appreciate a Web client, like Threema’s with none permanent sessions. But all that’s, as you’d say in German, “Meckern auf hohem Niveau”, especially since I’m not currently contributing to Signal.
Hm, but wouldn’t such an application be malicious by default? Having protection against attackers on your device seems of out scope for a messaging application, at that point I would consider something like Tails. Though this may be a rare case when moving to an appimage could help matters.
Yes and no. I personally would like to be asked permission for such behaviour, but a gallery application, for example, could have legitimate reasons to index all photos on your system. I personally prefer to manually set the folders it is supposed to index, but that doesn’t seem to be a generally accepted paradigm.
In general, I see why you need to trust that a system your app runs on is uncompromised to a a certain degree, but measures to potentially limit harm in case it is still seem sensible, especially for an app with a focus on privacy and security.
We set the threshold of sensible protections provided by the app (signal) itself differently.
On desktop having a gallery app, as you say, or running an application like windirstat for example I expect the user to understand that anything stored on device can be “seen” by the app and that, if they dont trust it, having sensitive files deleted or sandboxed might be prudent. Messages are stored at least somewhat encrypted (albeit with the key in a config file) so a random (non targeted/malicious) scan would gt blobs there.
On mobile due to how opaque the os is I am thankful for the extra encyption and I would consider it a much more critical flaw. On desktop less so. Still I appreciate your point of view and a passkey to encrypt at least messages on the desktop app would be a welcome addition.
Like I know native apps are always better, but why doesn’t electron ship an installable runtime so we don’t have to have a shitload of inert chromium installs on one machine?
You don’t understand. This way if some app crashes it will not cause others to crash too.
This is how google introduced the “multiprocess architecture” of Chrome.
You can still have separate processes and everything else with a shared runtime, you just save having all this wasted storage with every application bringing its own bundled runtime.
.net or Java applications work in a similar way, one Java app crashing won’t take out another just because they’re sharing the same runtime
I’d rather not have frameworks based on web browsers. Programming is not that difficult.
For most uses of electron I’d agree, but if some engineers are going to use it anyway, I’d prefer the approach I’ve described.
Programming is not that difficult.
Learning how to do something in a new language and framework isn’t that tough, I agree, but no one is going to become an expert in something overnight. I don’t reckon many desktop native engineers are choosing electron unless they actually need it, so if you imagine the case of an expert web engineer building a desktop UI, they’re going to do a much better job with their main skillset than something they have just learned.
but no one is going to become an expert in something overnight
It’s not like they need to become experts. But also that’s actually possible (at least the effects of that), especially with all the AI around.
It’s not like they need to become experts
I mean if they would produce a better UI by using their expertise, how would not becoming an expert in the new thing be better? The reality is that the people paying the engineer are going to want the better UX over the benefits of not using electron in most cases.
But also that’s actually possible
Respectfully, no it’s not, not with software engineering unless you’re talking about learning a simple library or something.
If someone can genuinely master something in a day it wasn’t much of a skill to begin with.
I’ve been in this industry for about 20 years now, I would find it very hard to believe an engineer who says they’ve gone from no knowledge to expert in a new framework/language in any short period of time. I would either assume they’re trying to pull a fast one or more charitably just in the “naively confident” phase of learning:
especially with all the AI around.
AI can assist you if you more-or-less know what you’re doing, but a novice replacing proper learning with ChatGPT pairing is going to write some shitty code. I use AI in my role semi-regularly, and in my experience, no model has consistently produced me anything (non-boilerplate) longer than a couple of lines that didn’t need some kind of refactor for it to actually be up to our code quality standards. Sometimes you see them spit out some ancient way of doing things that have been outright replaced by a more modern approach, if you don’t have the experience, you’ll not know any better.
Well obviously it is, or we wouldn’t have electron in the first place.
We have it only because some devs are lazy.
That’s why I am so happy that I switched to Matrix - selfhosted with Signal and WhatsApp Bridges(amongst others) and now I only need to keep one App on our mobiles, Notebooks,desktop,etc. but I can still communicate with everyone. (we have have a few mixed groups now)
Is Matrix another one of those apps that when you click on a download link it takes you to a page full of tech jargon shit like “nightly signed beta configs here, just unjibble the .trag file and recombobulate with a python scrab to mambo directory: AAATGFHHOLLLM56888NGAAA.tar.gz” ?
Or is it like an app normal people can use?
Of course not,
with the new encapsulator all you need is to reconfigure your turbomutator to allow electrostabilizer executable to directly read instructions from your self-hosted AI model.
Who even uses python to scrab anymore? Install podman dude.
Podman breaks the retroencabulation.
It’s not quite that bad but it was trickier than Lemmy.
I think you mean lazy illiterate people. just pay Google/amazon and be done with it
I don’t have the time nor the crayons to explain that to you.
as a big proponent of FOSS I see where you’re coming from - but the reality will always be that apps which have a significant learning curve to even install are obviously hugely off-putting to the majority of users. While the rest of us might be comfortable cloning a repository and building from a tar file, expecting the average person who wants to talk with friends and family to jump through those kind of hoops is exactly what has held back wider adoption of better standards.
Things like flatpacks and snaps have gone a long way to making this less daunting, but when matrix isn’t a ‘self-hosted decentralised chat’, it’s a *‘version of whatsapp that isn’t always online, and i don’t know where to download it and have to learn what the terminal is to even get it on my laptop’ * - we can’t be surprised people stick with the less secure, private, easy options. That’s why I’m a big advocate of signal - it’s not perfect and part of me wishes it was matrix or threema or one of the other standards, but getting people comfortable with the idea of free and open source software, while making it as simple for them to install on their phone or computer as anything meta makes is a really good first step - in the meantime, it’s up to us in the wider community to make the other solutions more intuitive, simple, secure, and trust that if a good enough job is done of that - they will come.
I managed to get my parents on signal because it’s functionally a WhatsApp clone
Your post encouraged me to self host Matrix ^^ That’ll be a nice project for the next rainy day
I self-hosted it few months ago, and it’s actually surprisingly easy! Someone has made an Ansible script for Matrix with Element and some bridges, that (at least a month ago, IaaC tends to be pretty fragile) worked out of the box on a first try. I just set up some config values (mostly about enabling bridges I want) based on their amazing documentation, and then ran it once and everything is working so far. I even updated it several times already, and every time it was smooth, and it was basically just running a single ansible command. Their documentation is pretty well written, and with my basic cloud, IT and Linux knowledge I had no issues with following it. All you need to know is how to set up cloud VM, get a domain and set DNS, and set up SSH keys to access the server.
In total it took me about two hours in total, from when I decided “I’m setting up Matrix tonight” without any prior knowledge, looking up my options and finding the ansible script, setting up cloud and getting Matrix up and running.
I’m renting a VM on Hetzner for like 6$ per month, and it worked without issues so far. I use it for Discord and Messenger, although the Meta bridge does have some problems, for example I didn’t figure out how to message someone with whom I haven’t had a conversation since I set up the bridge, since only then it creates the room for it. But that can be solved by keeping the Messenger app or usign the browser to send a first message, and it immediately shows in your Matrix bridge (and stays there forever).
Thank you for sharing your setup, this kind of information is always extremely valuable <3
Thanks,welcome to the club! It can be a bit “tricky” at times (and I use a container manager,cloudron, meanwhile as I got too deep into the rabbit hole and now host too many things to maintain them myself) but once you get it set up it’s rock solid.
And I am really optimistic for Element X/Matrix 2.0.
It’s a great standard.
Gonna repeat what I said to Mikina - Thank you for sharing your setup, this kind of information is always extremely valuable <3
I can switch to Matrix and talk to the two other users on this platform! Can’t wait!
Yeah, 115 Million users atm. And as I said - you can easily bridge it to other services so you only use Matrix but communicate with others.
I’ll give you a little anecdote. I joined a casual server on Matrix recently. Two minutes into the conversation, it turns out the person I was talking to is installing some Linux stuff and watching an episode of classic Doctor Who. That’s two of my biggest interests right there that we immediately connected over. If there are only two users on Matrix, they’re the only two I need.
Debian Linux installation ISO is only 336 MB, FFS. And that’s a whole operating system with user land!
Given that they have a native, non-Electron iOS version, it’s a shame that they haven’t built a desktop macOS version using mostly the same code. (To make it look like a proper Mac app, they’d need different UI code, though even without that, they could build a version that looks like the iPad version with no changes, and it would look no worse than the Electron web-app UI and run an order of magnitude more efficiently.)
They don’t even need to built a separate app if they have an iPad app. they just need to not „not allow“ the execution on macOS.
On my phone is only 171mb.
And that’s also a lot for an app that doesn’t have that many binary assets like images or videos. I do wonder what makes up most of these sizes. I see other apps that are arguably more complicated - like AntennaPod - using under 40MB; So I guess it has to do with actual native apps vs cross platform ones.
They’re talking about the desktop application.
“Only”
Your phone has bigger problems if it cannot take 170mb apps, this isn’t the 1990s
That’s a very bad way to look at things. Just because I have gigabytes of memory doesn’t mean I want to use unoptimized software.
And your way to look at things that “all apps must be 20 mb or less otherwise they are unoptimised” is better because?
Because optimized software is better for industry, people, and environment. Also seeing that some menu or window is not an html page but a native element makes my headache go away because I value my CPU cycles (seeing a cursor doesn’t lag when some complex page is displayed should not be considered a weird fetish) and like it when things don’t do stupid unnecessary stuff both visually and under the hood.
And it could be even less than that depending on specifics.
Why would you not be able to continue chat from the phone? I don’t all the time.
Unclear if unintented funny typo, or intended funny comment.
Totally a typo lol
I think OP refers to the first install/link. It is a feature that previous conversations are not shown when you do a fresh client link.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320551-Linked-Devices
Is it possible to run the android app on Linux somehow? Hmm…
Waydroid! No idea if Signal works with it though, worth to try it
Sadly, it’s the only way I can contact someone to buy a decent quantity of weed in this state. I get less even if I go to a state where it’s legal and I pay more.
the solution could be deduplication, not sure if microsoft store has it, or windows supports it, this help with the size, bot not ram usage
Windows doesn’t support deduplication itself (though ntfs does support hardlinks if someone wanted to do it). It actually won’t help here because every electron app bundles different versions in practice.
Back in the day Signal was a Qt app, did that change?
Maybe you are thinking of Telegram?
I’m not sure of its past, this repo goes back 4 years, but Signal is electron https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/tree/main
Well dooh, you installed Chrome with it. Add to that their application and there you have it.
