Signal on Desktop survey?
community.signalusers.org
On this forum there is open discussion about Taking ownership of Signal Flatpak, but in my humble opinion, we need to have some measurements, before we can be taken more seriously by Signal desktop team. Can you please answer to bellow questions. Thank you. Which Signal on phone are you using: poll Which Signal on desktop are you using: poll Which method of installation are you using on Signal on desktop? poll If you are using Singal on Linux, on which Linux distribution you are using S...

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.

  • Guenther_Amanita@feddit.de
    20·
    2 years ago

    It sucks that they don’t allow a survey without logging in first. Had to create an account extra for taking part…

    • d_k_bo@feddit.de
      7·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      52·
      2 years ago

      Its not a Signal survey, this is by a random user.

      You can register anonymously.

  • s38b35M5@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 years ago

    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.

      • FutileRecipe@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        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?

        • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
          1·
          2 years ago

          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.

          • FutileRecipe@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 years ago

            Production environment is typically in the corporate world, not usually a homelab. Service providers often have a SLA uptime guarantee of 99%. They don’t often push patches as soon as available due to the varied nature of corporate environment. They don’t have one or two PCs to worry about: they can have tens of thousands. Downtime equates to money lost. So patches get tested before being deployed. Depending on the patch, that can be 48 hours to a week or two. Major OS upgrades can be months-long test, but the company usually does that and follows it while it’s still in beta.

            Updates are pointed to a server the company controls, not the Internet. Updates get tested on test servers and test machines that replicate those in production. It typically gets monitored for 48 hours to measure glitches and performance. Once satisfied, the company controlled update server pushes into production machines.

            Why test patches before deploying to productions?

            • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
              1·
              2 years ago

              Ok this is a specific case, interesting info, thanks.

              Obviously this has nothing to do with single user computers, going to software stores, pressing “update” buttons etc.

              So it is unrelated to my point.

  • GadgeteerZA@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    The post here is a link to an online survey being done by the Signal Community. Users need to follow the link to answer the survey if they wish (but it means creating yet another new account which I’m getting pretty tired of as I’m now passing over 900 different logins all with unique passwords etc ;-)

  • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
    21·
    2 years ago

    Personally I install it with pacman and generally avoid Flatpaks due to annoying problems I’ve had with it limiting filesystem access in the past. My biggest problem is that it seems to “forget” that I’m logged in if I don’t use it regularly, meaning I have to regularly re-auth it on my desktop since I use it infrequently there.

    • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      2·
      2 years ago

      Flatpaks are generally made way to loosely. Always “not breaking” > “being secure”.

      So this should not really be the case, drag&drop doesnt work yet, maybe copy-pasting files doesnt if the app cannot access that directory statically (you need to add an attachment from within the app, your file picker will open which is a “portal” which links that file into the apps container and thus allows the app to see it.)

      Everything else works normally, screensharing too

      • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        That’s an understandable goal, but as a user, breaking the user experience when I go to send a file to someone only to find that I can’t even see it in some apps is a deal breaker. If the app can’t be trusted to do that, I won’t use it.

        • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
          11·
          2 years ago

          What do you mean by this?

          This makes no sense.

          You cannot trust any app to do anything. Look at their code, or ask people that know people that heard of people that looked at their code (how it is currently done in FOSS, lol).

          Modern apps integrate portals & pipewire permissions. Bad apps dont, and they suck. Please annoy Slack with that, they have to adopt the Flatpak and modernize the code. Its like a few dozen lines to replace a custom own filepicker with the xdg-desktop-portal file picker of the OS.

          • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            I wasn’t talking about Slack. Actually, my worst Flatpak experience was with PyCharm. The fs limitations mean it couldn’t see files like ${HOME}/.config/git/ignore or load up my shell environment inside the IDE. It’s basically a neutered version of the app because someone decided to draw the security/usability line too far in the one direction.

            It’s fine if you think that’s a good idea, but as a user, the choice of packaging means it’s not useful to me, so I won’t use it.

            • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
              11·
              2 years ago

              Oh, the user above was mentioning slack, sorry.

              Pycham is also proprietary. This is an unofficial repackage of the app done by volunteers.

              It probably works fine just not for your workload. But I can imagine why someone would want to sandbox Pycharm…

              And to your issues, have you even tried to poke holes in the sandbox? You can use KDEs settings or Flatseal.

              Launching a terminal can be done via flatpak-spawn.

              I think you dont get this. Flatpak is important. Linux is completely powerless, there are people installing invasive apps which then can do what they can on Windows. Compare that to Android (which is obviously way less complicated because of how apps are used).

              Flatpak is a new system to build apps, of course it cant read some ~/.config directory thats the point. If you store stuff there you are used to a different way and will need to adapt. Or you use their official binaries.

              Just because apps are not ready this doesnt mean it is not clearly the way we will do GUI apps. 800+ apps officially verified. We are approaching official universal Linux support here!

              • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                No, I haven’t tried to poke a hole in a sandbox. Generally speaking, if I have a choice between pacman -S <app> or “install with Flatpak and then fiddle with sandbox settings” I opt for the former. I get that you think this is important, and Flatpak is a nifty idea, but in terms of usability, it has failed me repeatedly to the point where I don’t want to use it, so I don’t.

                You seem to be coming from a position of “Flatpak good, so everyone must use it”, which is nice, but it’s naïve. Flatpak is ok, but it has usability problems, and since you want people to use it, usability is kind of important. It also introduces a frustrating divide from a user perspective. The idea that “desktop apps” should be installed via Flatpak, and everything else with a proper package manager is madness from a user’s perspective. I don’t understand how you can’t see that, but you’re going to have to accept it 'cause newsflash: not everyone thinks like you.

                Finally, packaging for Flatpack is a Pain In The Ass. I say this as someone who’s tried it. The build system is clearly biased toward particular use cases and particular languages, which is great if you’re in that camp, but for everyone else it comes across as impractical for the intended purpose.

                So yeah, it’s great that this is important to you. Go ahead and develop the shit out of Flatpak, and maybe even work on the user experience some more. I’ll keep having a look from time to time, but for now, it’s not happening, and this attitude of yours, that the rest of us will just “need to adapt” to your preferred way of working… if I wanted that I’d use a Mac. GTFO.

                • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
                  11·
                  2 years ago

                  Its easy. If you have a problem, report it. Instead of arguing about it they may have already fixed it.

                  If you want to run a proprietary app unconfined, do so.

                  But you also have to admit that reading some git config in a non flatpak directory is actively against the sandboxing principle, and thus requires manually allowing that access.

                  Sure, flatpaks need more popups that do exactly that.

                  Dividing “GUI apps” and other packages is easy. Go to a store, if it has an icon, install it via flatpak, if it has no icon, then you may not do that.

                  Appstream metadata so to speak.

                  Finally, packaging for Flatpack is a Pain In The Ass

                  Agreed.

                  okay maybe stop being so rude? Flatpak is the possibility for a secure system. We see how painfully slow adoption for that is on every Desktop, mac and windows too.

                  But it is great to have this, and I am sure we could make your Pycharm work by applying that override. The rest has to be done by the developers and it is important to care.

                  It is the same as with wayland, people need to change their software to ask for permission, follow standards and dont do weird shit. Only then the UX is solved.

                  And by the way what is stopping you from just using some apps as native system apps, and flatpak for the rest?

  • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    2 years ago

    I generally use the latest available.

    I tend not to use flatpack. I lost a few nights trying to get OBS plugins to work in flat pack. It would probably be fine for something as simple and straightforward as signal. But it’s more or less nothing but disadvantage to end users. That said I’m sure it’s a great savings for you guys.