Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

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How are you framing this? It’s an Electron app so it exists but doesn’t integrate or perform great. Last I recall you still were required to provide a SIM to sign up & you needed an iOS or Android primary device to even use the desktop client. Can you use a standalone, fast desktop application like you can these other protocols? I would say no, so “support” has shades of gray to it.

This is how I got kicked off LINE… they had a Chromium app that I could use tethered to an app, they disabled support for LINE Lite (which had light/dark theme, E2EE, texting, voice/video calls, debatable trackers (Firebase), even stickers & sending a location @ 8MiB instead of 200MiB+ of the “heavy app”), I refused to “upgrade” as it was a downgrade to me, & since I was no longer registered with a “primary” device, I was booted from the network. I don’t think I want these mobile-duopoly-required apps to be my primary means of communication with folks—especially now that my primary phone isn’t Apple or Google (luckily Open Whisper lets WhisperFish exist).

> but doesn’t integrate or perform great.

Curious what you mean by this. I use the Signal Desktop app. It does what it's supposed to - send and receive messages in a timely way with no lag.

What poor performance are you seeing? What doesn't integrate?

Not GP but I've also had issues with the Signal Desktop app (installed from the Arch repos).

Its overall a little sluggish in general (like most Electron apps though, in fairness) and occasionally clicking and dragging images onto the application will cause it to freeze and eventually crash.

Plus, the general usability issues present in all variants of the signal client (like no easy way of restoring previous messages on a new device).

It's not terrible or anything, but it's just a solid 6/10 application. I personally wish they were more open to 3rd party clients, so I could have something that integrates with my desktop environment a little better and is snappier, like my Matrix clients.

I'll have to try clicking and dragging images onto the Signal application and see if I notice any difference. I usually actually click the button to add an attachment and then browse to it. I'm also on Win11 but I would hope the experience between OSs wouldn't be too drastically different.

I haven't used Signal desktop, but I find Electron apps in general to be very wasteful of system resources. Out of curiosity, I once compared an Electron-based chat app to a C++ alternative, and found that the former used about 25 times the RAM and generated more CPU load.

If GP's system resources are usually dedicated to other tasks, perhaps trying to run an Electron app on top of those led to resource contention, and poor performance. You wouldn't notice this if your hardware is overprovisioned for the things you do with it.

Can I use it without iOS and Android though?

No[1], but that wasn't what I was trying to get clarification on, or disputing for that matter.

1 - https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360008216551-In...

The Signal desktop app works fine, but you are right, it is still tied to a mobile account and a phone number. This is the main downside to Signal. I read that the Molly fork will support multiple accounts and a self hostable server. It probably won't be federated, but that is not really a problem when you can use multiple accounts and avoids a lot of headaches that come with federation.

Starts to sound like Signal isn’t the panacea some folks make it out to be :)

The other downside of the Desktop is that it requires periodic re-verification with the device you used to set it up. Desktop users are definitely second class citizens in the Signal ecosystem.

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