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Standalone Signal Desktop

signal.org

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Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#241

Post by StavrosK »

Multicomp wrote: post #240
StavrosK wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: What's an easy-to-use, popular cross-platform framework with bindings to a sane language? Something like QT/GTK to Python? I hate Electron, but what's the alternative? I used wxWindows back in the day, with Boa Constrictor, and I loved that workflow.

So I don't know about the definition for popular or sane languages but FWIW Lazarus is a free framework for producing truly portable, native applications for Windows/Mac/Linux/Android/iOs from the same code project. Think FOSS child of Delphi from back in the day.

Ah, yes, I've heard good things about Lazarus. The problem with it is that it uses its own language (Delphi, as you say), so it's got its own ecosystem and things. No matter how good the UI toolkit is, it's not worth giving up all the niceties of a language with an extensive ecosystem, for me.

It's a pity, because Lazarus does seem fantastic for desktop application development...

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#242

Post by rpeden »

StavrosK wrote: post #238
wh313 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because Electron has taken over desktop app development. While it does significantly lower the knowledge barrier to building desktop applications, it does come with a heavy memory overhead.

Honest question: What's an easy-to-use, popular cross-platform framework with bindings to a sane language? Something like QT/GTK to Python? I hate Electron, but what's the alternative? I used wxWindows back in the day, with Boa Constrictor, and I loved that workflow.

If you use QT and QML, you can write most (sometimes all) of your code in JavaScript.

Whether you consider JavaScript a sane language is up to you. :)

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#243

Post by pjmlp »

zbentley wrote: post #232
pjmlp wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Node.js APIs bundled with Electron expose considerably more functionality to JavaScript Which happen to be written in native OS languages.

So because open(2) is implemented in C in the standard library, I should only call it via C, and never invoke the wrapper function open() in python or whatnot? “Hybrid” does not mean what you think it does. The platform may be built on code in many languages, but to program for that platform, you only have to know one.

An application running inside a browser VM is anything but native, hence integrating it with the host OS turns it into an hybrid solution.

Using your example, C is native, Python is not.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#245

Post by bilkow »

Vinnl wrote: post #177
bilkow wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not entirely true. While Telegram's "cloud chats" are not end-to-end encrypted by default, they're encrypted at rest. They claim that "all data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other DCs in different jurisdictions."[0] It's not even close to perfect, but it's also not everything that the government wants. For me, the problem with Signal is based mainly moxi…

Note that Signal supports Google-free itself now - I'm running it on AOSP without Google Play.

It may now support working on devices without Play Services, but being the same apk, Google's libraries are still inside the app. This way it's not entirely free and doesn't fit F-Droid's inclusion policy. (https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/)

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#246

Post by squarefoot »

StavrosK wrote: post #238
wh313 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because Electron has taken over desktop app development. While it does significantly lower the knowledge barrier to building desktop applications, it does come with a heavy memory overhead.

Honest question: What's an easy-to-use, popular cross-platform framework with bindings to a sane language? Something like QT/GTK to Python? I hate Electron, but what's the alternative? I used wxWindows back in the day, with Boa Constrictor, and I loved that workflow.

Lazarus: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ It does multiplatform the right way, that is, compiling natively for every architecture instead of creating slugginess and bloat by forcing software to run interpreted or under VMs. Here are some projects using it. http://wiki.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Lazarus Also, both the IDE and generated software can run on different architectures, including ARM based boards such as the Raspberry PI and similar ones. I played with it also on Orange and Nano PIs with just one gig RAM: definitely not fast but useable; it should scream on the Odroid C2 or faster boards. My only wish is having something similar for Nim.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#247

Post by drdaeman »

terraforming wrote: post #212
unicornporn wrote: post #165

I so wish more people discovered Matrix or https://riot.im . To me it's simpler and works better than Signal while being decentralized and federated. It has excellent clients for all platforms (and these keep measages in sync with each other) and does not require a phone number.

Matrix is fantastic. However, riot desktop sucks in my opinion. Yet again, an electron app. You say that matrix "has excellent clients for all platforms". That is simply not true at this time. For linux, there's pretty much only 1 client that's currently usable, and that is riot (electron app). There's a fantastic one in the works, qmatrixclient (quaternion: https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion ), but it doesn…

There is also nheko (https://github.com/mujx/nheko), but it's not particularly mature and also has no Olm/E2EE support (https://github.com/mujx/nheko/issues/13)

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#248

Post by kome »

dopu wrote: post #150
kome wrote: post #19

Signal Desktop is not really standalone, because you still need to pair it with your phone. And the phone should be turned on. I am very privacy conscious, and I don't use a smartphone, at all, because it's basically a spying device in your pocket. Why Signal is all about privacy and then it forces me to pair it with a telephone? Telegram desktop is really standalone. They require a telephone number too (and that's v…

How can you be very privacy conscious yet lack ownership of the phone number that your Telegram account's registered on? Whoever takes ownership of that number can easily lock you out of your account while retaining access to everything you've ever posted.

Telegram is protected by an additional password. I hope that's the case for signal or whatsapp as well.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#249

Post by StavrosK »

squarefoot wrote: post #246
StavrosK wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: What's an easy-to-use, popular cross-platform framework with bindings to a sane language? Something like QT/GTK to Python? I hate Electron, but what's the alternative? I used wxWindows back in the day, with Boa Constrictor, and I loved that workflow.

Lazarus: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ It does multiplatform the right way, that is, compiling natively for every architecture instead of creating slugginess and bloat by forcing software to run interpreted or under VMs. Here are some projects using it. http://wiki.freepascal.org/Projects_using_Lazarus Also, both the IDE and generated software can run on different architectures, including ARM based boards such as the R…

Yeah, as I said in a sibling comment, Lazarus is pretty much exactly how things should work. I share your wish, though, I wish they had Python/Nim/Rust/something bindings.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#250

Post by hiimnate »

MarkSweep wrote: post #143
ktta wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it 4MB is a bit ludicrous. On first run (on linux) it downloads half a GB worth (508 MB to be exact) of 'browser content'. On first run. So this isn't light or native. It uses the same Chromium codebase, but atleast twice the size of Electron apps. https://hardbin.com/ipfs/QmNttGPf65DZ3eeuNCCWemrxyNzaHxLhpAZ... If the rest of you are wondering where the bulk of it came from, check libcef.so (466 MB)- which is…

For what it's worth, it only uses that when adding an account initially to display the login webpage. The CEF is not used in normal operation of the app. It appears the app's GUI is created using OpenGL. That said, I could not get the app to work with Google Hangouts or Facebook Messenger after 5 minutes of fiddling, so I gave up.

Why in the world would they do that? Can't they just launch a normal browser window or something? Downloading 500MB of chrome bloat just to display a login window seems ludicrous.
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