 Everybody welcome back to the channel today. We're gonna take a look at what's that telegram and signal. So there's been a lot of hubbub lately about People switching away from what's that because they're fake owned by Facebook and Facebook's gonna steal all your data and Facebook's the devil and all this stuff and whether you think that or not That's really, you know up to you because I mean a lot of people don't really have a problem with you know Facebook having your data because you probably have a Facebook account and therefore they already have your data So what's the matter if they have it more or have more data? But some of us, you know Probably most people who are in the floss community are more interested in their privacy and interested in not seeing Facebook have access to Every single piece of data. They've ever produced so what I've decided today is I'm going to take a little bit of a look at The the three main messaging apps What they are how they look especially on Linux And whether or not you should which one you should use so I've used all three of these fairly extensively and I have my favorite and I Will just point this out that for the most part This is like any other choice you make, you know in your computing life Is that it's mostly a personal preference and based on what you like the most So these are the three apps on Linux this one here that I've made the biggest for whatever reason is Signals here signal. This is WhatsApp and this is telegram And I'm gonna take a closer look at him. So what we're gonna do is actually look at the We're gonna try to try to answer four questions today about each of the apps and what we're actually gonna start off with What's happened, which is this one here which worked out really well, so we're gonna we're gonna like I said, we're gonna answer four questions Is it open source? How is it encrypted? What is the app like on Linux and what is the app like on mobile? So I won't be able to show you the app on mobile because I'm not set up to do that yet Maybe eventually someday I'll do that. So you're just gonna take my my word on it But I'm gonna answer answer those four questions on each of the app okay on each of the messaging clients and then at the end I will go through and answer which one I think you should use or what which one's my you know favorite So again, what's that? Is it open source? No, not even a little bit. It's I believe and I might be wrong about this I believe it open started out as open source as like an open source project And then when it was bought by Facebook, it was taken close first. I could be completely wrong about that I just vaguely remember Hearing about that. So as of right now, it is completely proprietary on by Facebook I mean, there's not much more to say about that. How is it encrypted according to the website, which I think I have their website here Yeah, this is their their website and It according to the website, it's end-end encrypt encrypted but some of your information and This is true whether or not your privacy your privacy policy says so some of your information is Like a phone number and your contacts and stuff are shared with Facebook Basically the whole hullabaloo that just went on of them changing their privacy policy was basically telling them that you That they were doing that they've been doing that already It was just the policy was actually they went through and told you that they were doing it Basically as it was going on that's the reason why people decided to flee from WhatsApp So yes, it is Encrypted end-to-end, but there's quite a bit of information that's being shared with Facebook. So what so what are the what is the app like on? Linux It's All right. So first of all, there's several third-party apps. There's not an official client for Linux This one here is called what's that for Linux? It's in the a you are I believe it's in the Ubuntu repositories. There's one's called. What's desks? There's one's called WTDL or something weird like that There are several of them. They're all basically web apps, you know, so electron based ran They're all terrible None of them are very good at all as you can see if I go back to this view here They don't One of the best things about a an application is that it when you change the size it kind of changes the interface So if I change just too far that becomes unusable And we'll talk about single doing the same thing But like with telegram down here, you can see I can still use this even though it's really really small So I'll talk about this more when we get this telegram, but the design of the app of WhatsApp is not that great Now you got to keep in mind it is a web app So that's just the way it is and because there's no official client, you know, that's just you know It's just something that Linux users has to have to deal with What is the app like on mobile the first party client is available? It's okay I think it's personally kind of ugly by default. You have to change the wallpapers and stuff in order to make it look like It's okay I've also found that's very pushy with notifications Always asking you. Hey, do you want to use your this your use this as your default SMS app? Do you want to? Share your contacts or do you want to contact your contacts to let them know you're on? WhatsApp and all this stuff over and over again, and you have to turn that kind of stuff off. It's it's very very pushy so Let's go ahead and move to signal Signal is it open source? Yes Kinda It does have some Google nonsense built into it. That is proprietary, but you can't get to the source code You just can't get to those googly bits I'm not sure about this the server side stuff. Oh, you know, actually, I do know about the server side Excuse me that kind of gets into the encryption stuff So how is it encrypted? It's encrypted and and it has a distributed network, which means that All their stuff isn't just like in one server center. It's also has It's also encrypted vignette or open source encryption protocol called the signal Encryption protocol or something like that. So that's very encouraging for the most part As far as I can tell other than the googly bits that isn't isn't the source code signal is Almost fully open source, which is fantastic. What is the app like on Linux? To be honest with you the App on Linux is horrible So here's one thing that didn't say about what's that in order to use both WhatsApp and signal you you have to have The application existing on your phone it has to be on your phone and you have to connect the two So if they somehow get disconnected your messages on your desktop won't show up They have to be connected you do this be a scanning a QR code and it's a really big pain in the ass That's just the way it is. There's there's no getting around it. They're tied together through that connection So if the phone if it's not running on your phone the desktop thing is not gonna work. That's just I mean, it's terrible design But that's not specific to Linux. That's all of them, you know the web app that's on Windows and Mac You can't just sign in with your your phone number You actually have to sign in on your phone and use the QR code thing In order to link them. I'm not sure if they did that because I think it's more secure Or what I think it's kind of a pain and really bad design As for the app itself, it has the same thing that same problem with what as WhatsApp had Which is not a responsive design. So if you if you make the window too small The app becomes unusual I've also noticed that the notifications on signal on the desktop Sometimes don't come through and I'm not sure whether or not that's just my system or if that's the case on all of the Everybody's app. So on mobile the app is very well designed as light and dark mode It's very usable and it doesn't force you to have all these crappy notifications like the WhatsApp one does I've also noticed the the notifications are much more consistent on the phone And I think it's because you're actually signed in on the phone You're not dealing with that weird bridge thing where but really what's happening with these clients both what's happened signal Is they're not getting the messaging from the cloud or the you know, the Interwebs they're getting it from your phone. So if it's that extra layer of complexity that makes it some of those Notifications fail. So on the phone the notifications for your messages come through fine. That was signal now. Let's talk about Telegram telegram Is it open source? Yes Kinda the clients are completely free and open source All their applications both desktop and mobile open source. The server side is proprietary That's just the way it is. It also works on a distributed network like signal, I believe How is it encrypted? Man telegram is complicated AF it has server side client encryption, but only in private chats Which are not by default By default All that you have is end-to-end encryption But if you're on a public chat, so like say you're on this arco linux one here None of this stuff is encrypted because anybody can see it I mean, that's seems fairly obvious if you're on a public chat, of course stuff doesn't need to be encrypted because anybody can join But if you're not in a public chat, you're just like in a say that like this is our you know our Linux cache chat for It's pretty old Because we don't use it, you know that often That's not a public thing. Nobody not everybody can Get in there, but it's not encrypted By default you have to turn that on They do have client-to-client encryption as far as I could tell that's also only in private chats I may be wrong on that so like I said the encryption thing on telegram is a little They do encrypt stuff the but the way they do it is complicated to understand What's the app like on Linux? The app on Linux for telegram is my favorite. It's the best of the bunch It is a web app But unlike the other two you sign into this one with your phone number and then it sends you a Like an authentication app code to your either SMS or through the telegram app on your phone If for whatever reason you went through an uninstalled telegram on your phone Your telegram on your desktop would continue to work. That would not be the case with the other two So that's really important. I think and I've also noticed that the notifications work better on The desktop app for telegram Compared to the other two Probably again because you're actually logged into it. So the messages are actually coming here Instead of going through your phone to your desktop What's the app on like on mobile It's also very very good. It's well-designed the notifications come through and You know, it's just really well-designed. I really do like it as you can probably can tell I Like telegram the best out of all of them. I think it's the best design in terms of apps I think it has the best Linux support for apps The encryption thing is a little wonky But if if but because it does have encryption at least even if you don't understand it It seems to be perfectly fine. I don't think it's as quite as secure as something like signal So I think signal if you're looking for the balls to the wall Most secure to messaging app signals probably the one you want to go to out of the three of these But telegram seems to do perfectly fine. It also seems to be the most popular of the three So you're gonna find more Public groups or whatever that you can join like the ARCA one or there's an Ubuntu podcast one and then you know so on and so forth so That is the three of the the three most popular messaging apps If I were you I'd use telegram simply because it has the best app for Linux So if you're on Linux, that's the one you should choose. I think hands down I don't care for the other two if you're gonna make a choice Either use telegram or signal. What's app is trash? I'm not even safe. It's big. I'm not even saying it's because it's proprietary I'm saying it's because it's trash. It doesn't have a good app. It shares your data. It's owned by Facebook I mean, there's no there's literally no reason to use what's that unless Like your entire family is using what's happening. You can't get them to switch to something, you know better In which case get new fan That wasn't that's not a funny joke Anyways, if you liked this video give us a thumbs up if you didn't give it a thumbs down You can support the channel in any number of ways You can go to patreon.com slash Linux cast or the easiest way you can just hit the subscribe subscribe button It's the big red boxy thing just underneath my fat face and you can also hit the notification bell icon and see open source software video things that I post seven days a week including a podcast once a week and It's awesome. You don't want to miss it. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time