… 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 wink
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)
Using an E2E chat app in your browser necessarily makes the keys and decrypted messages available to your browser. They would have the ability to read messages, impersonate users, alter messages, etc. It would defeat the purpose of a secure messaging platform.
I don’t get it. Who is “they”? Why can’t you fetch the encrypted message from the server and then decrypt it client side?
Steam is close but actually not electron, they use CEF - Chromium Embedded Framework which is something Electron uses too under the hood (afair)
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.
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.
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.
If developers optimized their apps, we could have phones that are 10x faster than 10 yeara ago. Instead they are the same speed and the same amount of apps fit in the bigger storage, because developers are lazy and use heavy, unoptimized technologies that use 10x the resources
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.
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.
Yes, as long as you set up the desktop client before sending the message.
Messages sent with Signal are encrypted per device, not per user, so if your desktop client doesn’t exist when the message is sent, it is never encrypted and sent for that device.
When you set up a new client, you will only see new messages.
See https://signal.org/docs/specifications/sesame/ for details.
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?
This is not entirely correct. Messages are stored on their servers temporarily (last I saw, for up to 30 days), so that even if your device is offline for a while, you still get all your messages.
In theory, you could have messages waiting in your queue for device A, when you add device B, but device B will still not get the messages, even though the encrypted message is still on their servers.
This is because messages are encrypted per device, rather than per user. So if you have a friend who uses a phone and computer, and you also use a phone and computer, the client sending the message encrypts it three times, and sends each encrypted copy to the server. Each client then pulls its copy, and decrypts it. If a device does not exist when the message is encrypted and sent, it is never encrypted for that device, so that new device cannot pull the message down and decrypt it.
For more details: https://signal.org/docs/specifications/sesame/
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
What does this mean? I use my phone and computer, and they sync up in real-time without any issues.
Debian Linux installation ISO is only 336 MB, FFS. And that’s a whole operating system with user land!
No, that’s a tarball of a kernel, basic command line tools, apt and a network stack that lets you download most of the operating system.
Um, no? The 336 megabyte usb installation media contains everything you need to install base Debian. Most people will want a desktop environment and other packages, they can connect to the network to download those additional packages.
Even the how-to says the network is optional.
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch02s04.en.html#idm368
