There are big wishes for Signal to adopt the perfectly working Flatpak.
This will make Signal show up in the verified subsection of Flathub, it will improve trust, allow a central place for bug reports and support and ease maintenance.
Flatpak works on pretty much all Distros, including the ones covered by their current “Linux = Ubuntu” .deb repo.
To make a good decision, we need to have some statistics about who uses which package.
It sucks that they don’t allow a survey without logging in first. Had to create an account extra for taking part…
The worst part about signing up somewhere is the amount of email spam that will land in you inbox. I don’t know about their specific configuration, but by default Discourse (the forum software they use) sends weekly “digest emails” if you haven’t visited the site for a week. So make sure to turn them off.
Its not a Signal survey, this is by a random user.
You can register anonymously.
Native desktop version.
First being able to use the service first-class on the desktop without registering with phone app first. Second is using native desktop technologies for the app, as Signal currently uses Electron so it is basically a website running in separate Chromium web browser without tabs.
I don’t care about the packaging format so much as about either having a Qt or GTK version or even just being able to open it in my browser.
Well, the .deb only works on Ubuntu and derivates so that doesnt really matter
There is Flare. I haven’t used it myself because it’s not official and I don’t know what it will do to e.g. my backups, but just sharing in case you’re interested.
I prefer the deb that works. I get a signal.update almost every other day. I don’t remember to update my flatpaks anywhere near that often. I also appreciate that it doesn’t force me to include dependencies that are already met.
You can update flatpaks automatically using systemd. Automatic updates are a thing and should be everywhere.
https://discuss.kde.org/t/improving-metered-network-detection-and-usage/9287
Automatic updates are a thing and should be everywhere.
Absolutely not…most especially prior to production deployment. How else would someone see the change logs before hand or see/test if it would hurt their environment?
I have no idea what a production environment is for you. If it is some kind of sealed off stuff yeah maybe, but otherwise I hope you use a Distro that handles updates the way you need it.
Not updating because things will break is a sign of a bad distro.
How about putting it on F-droid? That won’t happen as they ship to much proprietary software.
Signal wants to provide updates themselfs to make sure they are fast in case of big security bug. F-Droid can lag behind to provide new version of app.
But they should at least provide F-Droid repo.
F-droid is only a few days behind at most. They are arguing against F-droid with evidence that’s out of date. I think it has more to do with laziness than anything.
The good news is that Molly exists.
Laziness is a very negative way of putting it. Another would be prioritisation - with limited budget, what is the best way to get as many people as possible to have their communications encrypted?
