Re:Standalone Signal Desktop
by terraforming on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @05:48AM
(#15599844)
Matrix is fantastic. However, riot desktop sucks in my opinion. Yet again, an electron app. You say that matrix "has excellent clients for all platforms". That is simply not true at this time. For linux, there's pretty much only 1 client that's currently usable, and that is riot (electron app).
There's a fantastic one in the works, qmatrixclient (quaternion: https://github.com/QMatrixClient/Quaternion), but it doesn't support E2EE yet.
There is a Weechat plugin.
There is also nheko (https://github.com/mujx/nheko), but it's not particularly mature and also has no Olm/E2EE support (https://github.com/mujx/nheko/issues/13)
Re:Standalone Signal Desktop
by vertex-four on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @09:18AM
(#15600857)
I don't agree that Matrix has excellent clients for all platforms - IMHO, only Riot Web/Desktop is usable, and that only in comparison to other open-source messaging software - it doesn't compete against pretty much anything that people make money off of. Riot iOS and Android both make it nearly impossible to handle a large amount of chatrooms, IME. And nothing else implements even most important features of Matrix.
The developers badly need to invest in a UX engineer, but are currently stuck scrambling for money as their corporate sponsorship ran out.
Re:Standalone Signal Desktop
by work_account on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @01:01PM
(#15603247)
Matrix is terrific. I've "converted" some friends from Signal to Riot and we're not going back. Video/calls and group chats work a lot better, and the riot.im web client is excellent (at least, compared to Signals lack of).
I've also stopped using an IRC client and just use a Matrix bridge. Really happy so far.
Main drawback is that E2E is a bit clunky to set up, and downright confusing for non-technical users.
To me it's simpler and works better than Signal while being decentralized and federated. It has excellent clients for all platforms (and these keep measages in sync with each other) and does not require a phone number.