Yeah, Signal used to handle changing phones pretty poorly but that is sort of solved now (you can store your groups and phonebook in the cloud behind a pin). Other than that it is really nice. The desktop client is arguably better than WA's web solution, although I have run into non-syncing messages, but, you can use the desktop client with your phone off, which is a major + imho.

Honestly, Signal is just super high quality when you take into account how privacy focused it is, I could easily replace WA with Signal, apart from "the network effect".

> you can use the desktop client with your phone off, which is a major + imho

Indeed, if it has to go through my phone it's nigh unusable in my opinion. Wire and Element/Matrix handle this properly since they don't depend on a phone number in the first place (so no need to tie it to your phone), only Signal and Threema are somewhat of a pain in this regard since you need to link it, and only Threema absolutely requires your phone to be online all the time.