Comment by tpoacher
1 year ago
This is one of those questions where it's hard to answer but it's obvious once you use it.
What's the difference between a fiat and a ferrari? What's the difference between CentOS and Linux Mint? What's the difference between a macdonalds and a michelin burger?
I have friends and groups on both platforms. On Signal, I'm basically just sending messages (and only unimportant one, like, when are we meeting. Sending media mostly sucks so I generally only have very dry chats on Signal).
Whereas on Telegram, I'm having fun. In fact it's so versatile, that my wife and I use it as a collaborative note-taking system, archiver, cvs, live shopping list, news app (currently browsing hackernews from telegram), etc. We basically have our whole life organised via Telegram. I lose count of all the features I use effortlessly on a daily basis, and only realise it when I find myself on another app. This is despite the fact that both Signal and whatsapp have since tried to copy some of these features, because they do so badly. A simple example that comes to mind: editing messages. It took years for whatsapp to be able to edit a message (I still remember the old asterisk etiquette to indicate you were issuing a correction to a previous message). Now you can, but it's horrible ux; I think you long press and then there's a button next to copy which opens a menu where you find a pencil which means edit, or sth like that. In telegram I don't even remember how you do it, because it's so intuitive that I don't have to.
Perhaps that's why I find the whole "Telegram encryption" discussion baffling to be honest. For me, it's just one of Telegram's many extra features you can use. You don't have to use it, but it's there if you want to. I don't feel like Telegram has ever tried to mislead its users that it's raison d'etre is for it to be a secret platform only useful if you're a terrorist (like the UK government seems to want to portray it recently).
I get the point about "encryption by default", but this doesn't come for free, there are usability sacrifices that come with it, and not everyone cares for it. Insisting that not having encryption by default marrs the whole app sounds similar to me saying not having a particular set of emojis set as the default marrs the whole app. It feels disingenuous somehow.
I second the point about the difference. Can’t tell why, but signal and whatsapp feel just awful ui/ux-wise. And that’s not a habit thing, I’ve used whatsapp before telegram (and still it was unideal). Telegram knows UX-fu and how to grow without being the only player on the board.
I think it's mainly Telegram's native feel (and it is native on every platform it supports afaik). It's even in little trivial things like the rubber band effect on Apple's platforms, then in how smooth the loading of missing stuff from the network is, and finally it's in the design: Telegram is slick.
All those little things combined and when you switch from Telegram to Signal or WhatsApp it feels like going a couple of decades back, or something like that.
Honestly I don't know how much I can trust Telegram and its founder Pavel Durov (I probably shouldn't), but in terms of the quality of software it's unmatched.
> Perhaps that's why I find the whole "Telegram encryption" discussion baffling to be honest. For me, it's just one of Telegram's many extra features you can use. You don't have to use it, but it's there if you want to. Well, as soon as you crate all e2ee chat most features are gone for this chat. It doesn’t even sync on multiple devices. And e2ee is not available for group chats.
It’s more like they implemented it to check a box …
Nothing wrong with "encryption? check" if the encryption part works as intended.
None of the typical criticism against Telegram is directed at whether this is the case or not; usually people start by assuming Telegram is something it doesn't claim to be (a super-secure encrypted-exclusive communications app), and then proceed to attack the scarecrow by pointing out that it's not encrypted-exclusive. Whereas Telegram just says it provides the ability to encrypt your chats if you want to, but otherwise it's more of a multiplatform social platform. It specifically does not state that its sole purpose and raison d'etre is that you, either as a private person or as a terrorist or whatnot, should feel safe and secure using this tool at all times and expect to be untraceable.
The point I'm making here is, if a box needed to be checked and they checked it (properly), then people ranting "ermagerd what about all the other checkboxes that you don't need but other system with different priorities and mission statements have" isn't really useful criticism against the project. Let alone suggesting Signal etc as an alternative, which is like suggesting a raspberry pi to someone wanting a macbook experience.
> Whereas on Telegram, I'm having fun
I guess I fail to see the need for having fun in a messaging app. Signal covers all my major requirements, Telegram, while fun, does not.
Honest question - is Linux Mint the Ferrari of linix?
It is to me :) (though obviously it depends what kind of user you are and what you're looking for in your OS).
As a 'personal' user (rather than sysadmin), I tried more distributions than I can count before settling on linux mint, both 'beginner friendly' and 'advanced (e.g. Slackware/Gentoo)'. Ever since I've discovered Linux Mint I've not looked at another distribution (except occasionally for 'shits and giggles' in at least a decade. I feel it is very respectful of its userbase and has exactly the right mix of user-friendliness and non-patronisingness that I would expect from an OS project.
Small example from the latest release: ubuntu suddenly decided to only provide its thunderbird package exclusively as a snap, so the mint team assigned a maintainer to preserve a mint-hosted .deb file on their own repo. While ubuntu has been moving to snaps and flatpaks, mint has listened to its user-based and allocated resources to 'undo' stupidities by ubuntu where they occur. And they've been wise enough to maintain a debian-based rolling-release alternative as a contingency.
Having said that, I have been using the XFCE variant exclusively over cinnamon, which I got used to when I had a line-up of severly underpowered laptops for years. So a lot of it is probably also habit by this point.