KLISHDFSDF

I've been hoping this project makes significant progress for the last few years to run GUI apps. unfortunately it's been slow as there's not as much interest in getting Mac apps to run on Linux as there is with WINE. that said, I don't fault them, it's a daunting task and wine has the benefit of three decades of progress under their belt.

for those not familiar, this basically lets you run command line tools. anything with a GUI will not work.

link for the lazy?

You're right, Signal is not P2P. The way Signals messaging pipeline works is like this - note I'm oversimplifying it for accessibility.

Sending a message to Bob

1. You press Send.
2. The message is encrypted on your device with a key that can only be unlocked by Bob.
3. The message is then "sealed" so that there's only a "deliver to" field visible (not a "from").
4. The "deliver to" field is addressed with a hashed/salted label for Bob - this means Signal's server can see its a unique user, but not what their name is.
5. The message is finally sent to Signal's servers.
6. Your message sits on Signals servers until it can be delivered to the intended recipient.

you can’t really do user lookups without some sort of middleware in the cloud.

See their blog post about Private Contact Discovery, they've spent a long time figuring out how to engineer a method to know as little as possible about you.