this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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It's a shitty overbloated Electron app.
It's fast and has good functionality, what exactly is bloated about it?
People being triggered by the sheer existence of Electron – it just HAS to be "shitty", even if it works perfectly fine.
I can appreciate the functionality, but cannot really call an application "good" if it eats up more than half a gigabyte of RAM while being something as simple as a messenger.
Also there are better solutions if you want to have your UI in HTML nowadays. You don’t need to embed a whole web browser in each app.
Which ones, for example?
Something like tauri does, by using the OS web engine, so the apps can be a few KB (depending on the code of course).
It takes up half a GB of RAM and constantly keeps the CPU active. It's still on X11 and thus integrates poorly with the rest of my Wayland apps. It seems to report itself to Pipewire as something else every other week and is thus impossible to control reliably.
It works well and I haven't encountered any crashes or other bugs in months. But I genuinely think it could have been much better as a QT app or so. Plus, thanks to Electron there isn't an ARM version either making it impossible to run on my Raspberry Pi or my Pinephone.
Use these to enable Wayland support: --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland
To launch the app on ARM, install electron from package manager, copy paste signal's application directory and launch like this:
/path/to/electron /path/to/app.asar
I don't use Signal, these are generic instructions for electron apps so YMMV.
I don't know why they didn't just make it a web application. It's the same damn thing. Just like there's web.whatsapp.com, make Signal the same way. At least that way I get to use my own browser and in a single instance.