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KillingTimeItself ,

ignoring the fact that it’s absolutely horrid.

An install of ICUE on windows takes up multiple gigabytes. Why? Uhm, good question.

alyth OP ,

they just went dd if=/dev/urandom count=1 bs=1G of=./ICUEAppData

KillingTimeItself ,

three times over, no less.

irotsoma ,
@irotsoma@lemmy.world avatar

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.

KillingTimeItself ,

and it also runs like shit too.

alyth OP ,

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 😭

irotsoma ,
@irotsoma@lemmy.world avatar

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.

asparagapple , (edited )

Signal package has Electron (which is built on top of Chromium and NodeJS) + Signal app code and assets. So not surprised that it’s bigger than Chromium.

onion ,

Harddrives start at 16€/TB, so 500MB would be 0.008€. SSDs start at 50€/TB, so it would be 0.025€ or two-and-a-half cents

filcuk ,

I don’t think people are worried about storing hundreds of Signal instances, this isn’t a photo backup.
The concerns are bloat, optimisation, and memory usage.

Also, HDDs can go from $7.5/TB

captainjaneway ,
@captainjaneway@lemmy.world avatar

That’s the point. The storage is a bad metric. While it might indicate poor performance, it’s not a direct indication of poor performance. The bloat and optimization comes from the usage of Electron. And people use Electron because it’s far easier to make cross-platform deployments for Web and desktop using a framework like Electron. Show me the QT/JavaFX app that mimics Signal and we can compare the cost to develop it. Electron isn’t the best choice for memory usage and reducing bloat, but it’s the best choice for quick development (in my opinion but also proven out by the market share it has)

Sethayy ,

Me putting a 4 TB 3.5" HDD in my phone

onion ,

Why are you installing Signal Desktop on your phone?

Sethayy ,

You got me there

KillingTimeItself ,

yes but think about how much money writing 500MB worth of code would cost.

I realize it’s not all code, and some of it is already written, but please, muse me, and do the math for it.

onion ,

Writing less code costs more money. The programm is large because they slapped some existing stuff together instead of writing everything from scratch

KillingTimeItself ,

there is an inevitable cost to written code though, it simply cannot be computed away. In this case the cost is just a shitty application with an even shittier user experience.

leaveWitX ,

Haha, WeChat is even more outrageous than this. All your forwarded files will be automatically stored again. Your chat records will always be stored on the disk, but WeChat will tell you that the chat records have expired. In addition, it has recently been discovered that every Once you log in to WeChat, your avatar will be saved more than ten times

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

You can actually delete the data for good in both the android and windows software through the interface, and it works. But yeah the amount of data is staggering.

I’ve got a reminder in my calendar to delete the data on the first day of a new quarter, so this here is accumulated since April 1st:

image

KillingTimeItself ,

“android is good” mfers when they have to manually set a calendar task to notify themselves to manually delete the bloated information for an app that they have installed.

no shade to you specifically, but it pisses me off how much android users circle jerk over it being better than IOS, even though it’s like, moderately less annoying.

nexussapphire ,

Calm down children, they both suck. Now put the rulers away.

KillingTimeItself ,

they both suck.

this is literally just what i said, but ok.

viking ,
@viking@infosec.pub avatar

I can automatically clean up space, or restrict space used, but then I don’t get to choose who’s data to keep or.

KillingTimeItself ,

gotta love when they implement half of the functionality, instead of just implementing all of the functionality, because it would take like, ten more seconds.

hondacivic ,

iphone mfs when they have to read the word android

insert weird rambling about superiority while feeling superior themselves

KillingTimeItself ,

while true, i am not an iphone user, and IOS is still rather funny.

answersplease77 ,

even the phone app is larger than telegram and whatsapp

Vilian ,

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

AProfessional ,

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.

Username ,

Back in the day Signal was a Qt app, did that change?

AProfessional ,

Maybe you are thinking of Telegram?

I’m not sure of its past, this repo goes back 4 years, but Signal is electron github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/tree/main

FlyingSquid ,
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Sadly, it’s the only way I can contact someone to buy a decent quantity of weed in this state. I get less even if I go to a state where it’s legal and I pay more.

RaoulDook ,

What’s so sad about it? You have the ability to securely send E2EE messages for free. I’m very pleased with Signal after using it for years.

If you mean it’s sad about the weed being hard to get / illegal… yeah, I concur. Hopefully Schedule III happens soon and nationwide Medical will be legal.

devilish666 ,

410mb for chat app seems very unoptimized

Blackmist ,

Image

masterspace ,

Hey now, the three React Native for Windows apps would be very offended if they were stable enough to read text input.

udon ,

wait till you meet Line 😶

lengau ,

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.

philpo ,

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)

alyth OP ,

Your post encouraged me to self host Matrix ^^ That’ll be a nice project for the next rainy day

philpo ,

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.

alyth OP ,

Gonna repeat what I said to Mikina - Thank you for sharing your setup, this kind of information is always extremely valuable <3

Mikina ,

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).

alyth OP ,

Thank you for sharing your setup, this kind of information is always extremely valuable <3

ealoe ,

I can switch to Matrix and talk to the two other users on this platform! Can’t wait!

philpo ,

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.

alyth OP ,

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.

Takumidesh ,

I think the vast majority of people are more interested in talking to people they know in real life.

Cryophilia ,

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?

Lazycog ,
@Lazycog@sopuli.xyz avatar

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.

Aqarius ,

Podman breaks the retroencabulation.

sczlbutt ,

If you want to deal with the perpendicular crosstalk caused by the coaxial flutter...

JackbyDev ,

It’s not quite that bad but it was trickier than Lemmy.

FractalsInfinite ,

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.

philpo ,

I don’t have the time nor the crayons to explain that to you.

discount_door_garlic ,

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.

philpo ,

Sorry,but have you at least read the wikipedia article before writing this post?

Matrix is a standard. Not an App. Just like Lemmy is.

There are dozens of clients (Element, Schildichat, Fuzzychat, Beeper) available to download for basically every system imaginable and in all major Appstores.

You can easily join an existing instance - and with beeper there is even one existing that handles all the bridges for you.

Only when you self-host it gets more tricky-just like it does with Lemmy(as a matter of fact Matrix is far easier to selfhost than Lemmy). And again there are various distributions available. They aren’t as easy as the clients and not as easy as flatpacks, but someone who has done their due diligence can absolutely handle them easily. (And self-hosting should absolutely not be “as easy as flatpacks/snaps” - the risk for both the admin and the net itself is too high). But again: The average user has little incentive to selfhost. Just like you don’t selfhost your Lemmy instance.

The Matrix environment is as easy to use as Signal, Threema, WhatsApp for ages now. In some points I would even argue that it’s more user friendly than Signal,btw.

KillingTimeItself ,

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.

i think part of the problem is that stuff like matrix is built for a very specific interface. Where as we could build something like matrix, in a different design meta, more akin to something like mumble, which not only greatly simplifies the construction of it, but also greatly simplifies administration of it. The protocol itself shouldn’t innately require an obtuse arbitrary system that makes it a nightmare.

Anything that is remotely related to “web apps” or web in general, seems to be an utter fucking nightmare these days. I think we need a healthy dose of dedicated native applications.

Cryophilia ,

I managed to get my parents on signal because it’s functionally a WhatsApp clone

TseseJuer ,

I think you mean lazy illiterate people. just pay Google/amazon and be done with it

ProdigalFrog ,

Don’t be an elitist bung hole, dude.

TseseJuer ,

elitist because I said they don’t want to read? lol ok … you weirdos get so butthurt over a simple statement

ProdigalFrog ,

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.

Cryophilia ,

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.

TseseJuer ,

tech bro? wtf does that even mean. maybe stop crying that cOmpUteRs ArE hArD and use your brain

TseseJuer ,

being able to read and follow instructions = elitism

please get your head out of your rear end

vox ,
@vox@sopuli.xyz avatar

it’s as easy to get into as lemmy/masto/fedi

Carighan ,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

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.

prole ,

Yeah, I was going to say that I’ve used Signal on my Linux laptop and it’s janky af

tempest ,

Care to elaborate?

I use the app from the AUR and I don’t think I’ve had a single problem in 3 years.

prole ,

I’ve recently had an issue where it wasn’t let me paste anything that I had copied from outside the app

amelia ,

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.

lengau ,

The best version of the Signal app was back when it was available as an actual web app.

PrettyFlyForAFatGuy ,

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.

vox ,
@vox@sopuli.xyz avatar

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

KillingTimeItself ,

it won’t even use the OS emoji font.

im still amused by the fact that discord mobile uses two yes, you read that correctly, TWO emojis sets, it uses one in app, and the selector, and then uses another for the text input line, because.

Gimpydude ,

Why would you not be able to continue chat from the phone? I don’t all the time.

Lost_My_Mind ,

Unclear if unintented funny typo, or intended funny comment.

Gimpydude ,

Totally a typo lol

sudneo ,

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.

support.signal.org/…/360007320551-Linked-Devices

VeganCheesecake ,
@VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

kostas ,

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?

VeganCheesecake ,
@VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

kostas ,

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.

VeganCheesecake ,
@VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

kostas ,

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.

Natanael ,

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.

VeganCheesecake ,
@VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

lemmytellyousomething ,

Same. I’ve seen the alternative called dependency hell too often… Yes, you can.share stuff between apps, but then, versioning is a nightmare.

LainTrain ,

This is why I moved to Telegram. Idk if it’s actually native, but often feels much more so, and less phone-centric than Signal which requires weird auth rituals involving the phone.

snake_case_lover ,
@snake_case_lover@lemmy.world avatar

its a QT+Webview project. So C++ and JS together. Cpp doing heavy tasks while JS doing cute animatons.

toastboy79 ,

friendly reminder

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/signal-vs-telegram

If you care about security, stop using telegram.

0x30507DE ,
@0x30507DE@lemmy.today avatar

Personally, I’m a big fan of XMPP, due to the inherent resiliency in being decentralized/federated, and due to the security provided by OMEMO (based on signal’s algorithm). Don’t have to worry about third-parties messing with my data if it stays on my server that’s in my house.

rdri ,

Signal is not an alternative to telegram and vice versa. Telegram has too many public communication features that people often use. The nature of signal will prevent it from having similar features.

Carighan ,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

People want a chat app. If your secure chat app sucks as a chat app, it doesn’t matter how secure it is. It failed the primary use case it was meant to be developed for.

But keep in mind, Signal’s nature is no excuse to have shitty app implementations. In particular to have desktop apps as second-class citizens (and tablets as exterminated not-citizens). You can be a secure chat app. Signal got the secure part done, they’re just struggling with the chat app part.

seliaste ,
@seliaste@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The telegram desktop app is wonderful

9point6 ,

Like I know native apps are always better, but why doesn’t electron ship an installable runtime so we don’t have to have a shitload of inert chromium installs on one machine?

rdri ,

You don’t understand. This way if some app crashes it will not cause others to crash too.

This is how google introduced the “multiprocess architecture” of Chrome.

9point6 ,

You can still have separate processes and everything else with a shared runtime, you just save having all this wasted storage with every application bringing its own bundled runtime.

.net or Java applications work in a similar way, one Java app crashing won’t take out another just because they’re sharing the same runtime

rdri ,

I’d rather not have frameworks based on web browsers. Programming is not that difficult.

gandalf_der_12te ,
@gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Well obviously it is, or we wouldn’t have electron in the first place.

rdri ,

We have it only because some devs are lazy.

9point6 ,

For most uses of electron I’d agree, but if some engineers are going to use it anyway, I’d prefer the approach I’ve described.

Programming is not that difficult.

Learning how to do something in a new language and framework isn’t that tough, I agree, but no one is going to become an expert in something overnight. I don’t reckon many desktop native engineers are choosing electron unless they actually need it, so if you imagine the case of an expert web engineer building a desktop UI, they’re going to do a much better job with their main skillset than something they have just learned.

rdri ,

but no one is going to become an expert in something overnight

It’s not like they need to become experts. But also that’s actually possible (at least the effects of that), especially with all the AI around.

9point6 ,

It’s not like they need to become experts

I mean if they would produce a better UI by using their expertise, how would not becoming an expert in the new thing be better? The reality is that the people paying the engineer are going to want the better UX over the benefits of not using electron in most cases.

But also that’s actually possible

Respectfully, no it’s not, not with software engineering unless you’re talking about learning a simple library or something.

If someone can genuinely master something in a day it wasn’t much of a skill to begin with.

I’ve been in this industry for about 20 years now, I would find it very hard to believe an engineer who says they’ve gone from no knowledge to expert in a new framework/language in any short period of time. I would either assume they’re trying to pull a fast one or more charitably just in the “naively confident” phase of learning:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/00157a44-778b-40d0-a0d8-afcabf1384a8.webp

especially with all the AI around.

AI can assist you if you more-or-less know what you’re doing, but a novice replacing proper learning with ChatGPT pairing is going to write some shitty code. I use AI in my role semi-regularly, and in my experience, no model has consistently produced me anything (non-boilerplate) longer than a couple of lines that didn’t need some kind of refactor for it to actually be up to our code quality standards. Sometimes you see them spit out some ancient way of doing things that have been outright replaced by a more modern approach, if you don’t have the experience, you’ll not know any better.

rdri ,

I mean if they would produce a better UI by using their expertise, how would not becoming an expert in the new thing be better?

I failed to understand the meaning of this sentence. It doesn’t make sense to me. Producing a better ui is not even on the table when we are talking ui frameworks and native programming - you use what’s available, and if you are a graphics designer then maybe you should’ve sticked to that instead. Becoming expert in native ui is super cool but I wouldn’t expect such miracles from everyone. Just producing a valid low level code is enough to meet my standards of performance. That’s because those standards were heavily affected by web frameworks existence.

The reality is that the people paying the engineer are going to want the better UX

And I hoped it would be customers who would pay for a software or a service who would send valid feedback.

AI can assist you if you more-or-less know what you’re doing

Assuming web devs creating apps don’t know what they’re doing?

but a novice replacing proper learning with ChatGPT pairing is going to write some shitty code.

Chances are that code would be much more optimized than anything electron/CEF wrapped.

to actually be up to our code quality standards

Quality standards are great. But seeing companies shipping fixes to simple CSS issues that were breaking some of main app functions made me realize most of them don’t care about quality standards. If that’s how it is and if there will still be a lot of broken stuff across app updates - might as well just go all the way to proper low level languages.

thepreciousboar ,

May be, but I don’t think apps use it. Afaik Teams, Discord and such are all epectron apps, yet they have not much in term of dependencies and large install sizes, so they must ship with their own versions.

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