… and I can’t even continue the chat from my phone.
ignoring the fact that it’s absolutely horrid.
An install of ICUE on windows takes up multiple gigabytes. Why? Uhm, good question.
they just went dd if=/dev/urandom count=1 bs=1G of=./ICUEAppData
three times over, no less.
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.
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
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 winkI 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.
Can’t wait to see something using Rust and Tauri.
What about sciter?
Steam is close but actually not electron, they use CEF - Chromium Embedded Framework which is something Electron uses too under the hood (afair)
Electron doesn’t use CEF, they directly bundle Chromium.
Steam used an embedded browser long before it was cool.
Thanks for the correction, appreciate it. Not sure it changes much though.
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.
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?
I think the encrypted messages are not saved in the server. You probably have to backup from phone and restore it on pc. “They” is the other programs running on browser
“They” is the browser/browser maker. The browser, acting as the client, would have access to the keys and data. The browser maker could do whatever they want with it.
To be clear, I’m not saying they would, only that it defeats the purpose of an E2E chat, where your goal is to minimize/eliminate the possibility of snooping.
You realize that your kernel which loads keys into memory can also access all this right? So can anything which shares memory space on the platform.
The bigger risk is browser exploits, not just who develops it. There’s more attack surface and more ways to exfiltrate data
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)
I don’t know how other Linux distros do it, but Manjaro (and seemingly Arch) seem to carry
#
packages separately from apps like Signal. Unfortunately, Element requires electron29 and Bitwarden electron28 so I still have two copies of Electron. BTRFS’ deduplication helps reduce the real world size a bit, but it’s still unfortunate, especially since electron31 is already out.Signal runs some security code natively so you can’t run it in the browser, even though most of the UI is done through a copy of Chrome. At least the reusable packages make it so that only one copy of Chrome will be loaded for all Electron applications!
RE: the RAM: a lot of that is space allocated for JIT. Most of it is filled with zeroes, so if you run a modern OS (recent Linux, Windows, macOS) that RAM will end up being compressed+CoW’d to the point of barely making a dent.
Plenty of optimisations to be done, but it’s not as bad as task manager may make it seem. I’ve personally replaced a bunch of web apps with Element by bridging everything through Matrix (Matrix alternatives such as XMPP can also do that with an even smaller footprint).
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.
While I’m on the subject, Signal’s phone UI is not great. Most screens severely lack contrasting colors and borders. Font size and spacing is inconsistant. It is hard and unpleasant to read - that’s kind of unfortunate for an app focused on reading and writing text.
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
even the phone app is larger than telegram and whatsapp
The unability to continue chat from phone is a feature.
What does this mean? I use my phone and computer, and they sync up in real-time without any issues.
After they dropped SMS support and called that a feature, now I can’t wait for their hottest new bug!
Inability.
Thanks
Unabilifiedness
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
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/
That’s for your insightful comment. I’m now going down the rabbit hole of the signal spec :)
But if I reply on the phone will it populate the desktop chat and vice versa?
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.
Cool, could I recover a backup to te desktop to have access to the historical ones?
Signal Desktop does not support transferring message history to or from any device.
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 sharing of messages between linked devices - that would break forward secrecy, which prevents a successful attacker from getting historical messages. See the first bullet of: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320551-Linked-Devices
Messages are encrypted per device, not per user (https://signal.org/docs/specifications/sesame/), and forward secrecy is preserved (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy, for the concept in general, and https://signal.org/docs/specifications/doubleratchet/ for Signal’s specific approach).
Message logs doesn’t break forward secrecy in a cryptographic sense, retaining original asymmetric decryption keys (or method to recreate them) does. Making history editable would help against that too.
What Signal actually intends is to limit privacy leaks, it only allows history transfer when you transfer the entire account to another device and “deactivate” the account on the first one, so you can’t silently get access to all of somebody’s history
You’re describing something very different - you already have the messages, and you already have them decrypted. You can transfer them without the keys. If someone gets your device, they have them, too.
Whether Signal keeps the encrypted the messages or not, a new device has no way of getting the old messages from the server.
I run a cryptography forum, I know the exact definition of these terms. Message logs in plaintext is very distinct from forward secrecy. What forward secrecy means in particular is that captured network traffic can’t be decrypted later even if you at a later point can steal the user’s keys (because the session used session keys that were later deleted). Retrieving local logs with no means of verifying authenticity is nothing more than a classical security breach.
You can transfer messages as a part of an account transfer on Signal (at least on Android). This deactivates the app on the old device (so you can’t do it silently to somebody’s device)
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
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.
I don’t see why the current key can’t encrypt old messages and send those. I admit I might be missing something obvious though. Maybe something like not wanting to accidentally leak old messages? As in it’s less attack surface or something?
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
Signal is Electron (Chromium + NodeJS) + Signal app code and assets. So not suprised that it’s bigger than Chromium.
Source: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/blob/main/package.json#L294
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)
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
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?
It’s not quite that bad but it was trickier than Lemmy.
it’s as easy to get into as lemmy/masto/fedi
I think you mean lazy illiterate people. just pay Google/amazon and be done with it
Don’t be an elitist bung hole, dude.
elitist because I said they don’t want to read? lol ok … you weirdos get so butthurt over a simple statement
Not everyone has the ability or spare time to become skilled in every field. Calling them lazy and illiterate for not learning a complicated thing (when they may already be learning some other complex subject) is kinda the definition of elitism.
Tech bros are so fucking bad about this shit. Doctors too. I’m not an idiot, I fix big industrial machinery for a living, I can rewire your whole house up to code, but I don’t work in tech so I don’t know what the fuck a flapjack api is or whatever.
tech bro? wtf does that even mean. maybe stop crying that cOmpUteRs ArE hArD and use your brain
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
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.
If you want to deal with the perpendicular crosstalk caused by the coaxial flutter…
Podman breaks the retroencabulation.
It’s website seems to have had a graphic designer look over it. It seems to do the best of both worlds where you can download the default user friendly client or choose to go down the jargon route if you want to.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would you not be able to continue chat from the phone? I don’t all the time.
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
Unclear if unintented funny typo, or intended funny comment.
Totally a typo lol
Yeah, I’ve been having a lot of issues with Electron which is basically a browser emulator. It has gotten huge, so applications using it have gotten out of control in size. I get that it’s a quick way to build a cross platform application, but there really needs to either be a better way to distribute it that is more modular, or people need to start building on better cross platform front-end systems.
i am doing a full system upgrade and something wants to build chromium from source. i let it run in the background and cloning the repository alone has downloaded 33GB wtf 😭
Yeah, I had to move away from Arch Linux because lots of apps you have to build and Electron was one of the biggest culprits for using tons of disk space and time because it builds Chromium in its entirety from source. Electron is a great way to shift the cost of cross platform development from you to your customers.
and it also runs like shit too.
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.
And anytime you clicked on a link or image in the chat, you’ll have to click into the message field again (or press Ctrl+t) to be able to type a reply. I don’t understand how this absolutely infuriating thing hasn’t been fixed in years. Is nobody bothered by this? I want to be able to alt+tab into signal and just start typing ffs.
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.
telegram has an “advantage” of not having e2e encryption by default, which makes stuff like sync much easier as chats are fully stored on the server (encrypted with your user password).
and if you enable encryption (aka start a secret chat), the chat will only exist on the device you started it on and stop getting synced
Yeah, I was going to say that I’ve used Signal on my Linux laptop and it’s janky af
Care to elaborate?
I use the app from the AUR and I don’t think I’ve had a single problem in 3 years.
The best version of the Signal app was back when it was available as an actual web app.