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Comment by osamagirl69 | Hacker News Reader

To be honest the never ending headache of getting things to work with SELinux under RHEL was a big driver for why I moved to debian.

Certainly SELinux has its place but I never found the value it offers to be worth the complexity it adds.

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Same. People will always scream "it's not that hard just RTFM", but it's actually quite complex AND unique to RedHat's world. So of course when you are in a company that has a fleet of a mix of Ubuntu and Debian and RedHat, which is more common than you'd think, it becomes the oddball server nobody likes working on. And nobody wants to spend hours learning it in and out for just that. I don't think I ever worked at a shop that didn't end up disabling it completely out of frustration.

I never had any real problems with selinux, I've been using CentOS since version 5 something and with even just a cursory understanding of selinux I got by. Plus you could just disable it entirely by changing one setting so distro hopping for just this one thing seems a bit extreme.

The same reason why many people choose WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord over things like Signal or Matrix. They are just easier to use. It is about priorities. Maybe some day we solve the usability problems.

I get it for Matrix, but Signal really has had the same user experience as WhatsApp for years now. But anyway, your point still stands. That's why user-friendliness is an important part of security (and why Signal work is so important regarding secure messaging apps).

At most a little over one year ago, I installed Signal Desktop to open a link in a message I had received on my desktop. This is, apparently, deliberately unsupported, since the app claims that "[f]or your security, chat history isn't transferred to new linked devices". So no, the user experience of WhatsApp is miles ahead of Signal, at least if you want to use a real computer.

I think it is still impossible to backup one's own messages in Signal and then retrieve them back in another phone. It was possible on Android via root but basically impossible for unrooted phones which is a dealbreaker for Apple devices my friends and family use.

Signal has to provide 100% of the features and convenience of Whatsapp and some more without compromising security for it to be a viable alternative.

Backup/restore to a file works perfectly fine on unrooted Android phones.

Source: Just did it a couple weeks ago.

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