WhatsApp is the most widely used messenger in the world. It has more than two billion active user base which is great. We have adopted WhatsApp in our life and we use this for our very personal works, like personal media shearing and chats. But there is a catch.

Why we can’t trust Whatsapp?

While WhatsApp is a popular messaging platform known for its end-to-end encryption, which theoretically provides a high level of security for private chats, there are still some reasons why individuals might have concerns about trusting the platform completely. Here are a few factors to consider:

Ownership by Facebook: WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, and there have been concerns about how user data is shared between the two platforms. While WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted and Facebook claims not to have access to them, there have been changes to the privacy policy that allow for some data sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook.

Privacy Policy Changes: WhatsApp has updated its privacy policy in the past, leading to controversy and concerns about how user data is handled. While the end-to-end encryption remains intact, other data such as metadata, contacts, and account information may be collected and shared for various purposes.

Government Access: In some cases, governments may request access to user data for legal or security reasons. While WhatsApp claims not to have a backdoor for such access, the legal landscape can vary, and there have been instances of government requests for data.

So that’s pretty much clear that we need another platform from for our private message. Telegram and Signal is good alternative of Whatsapp. In this detailed article we are going to discuss how we can install Signal and Telegram on our Linux System, we are using Kali Linux here. But we can use the same method on any Debian based Linux distribution (Ubuntu, Mint, Elementary etc).

Signal

Signal is an open-source privacy focused software for private/group messaging and calls. It can be the perfect alternative to WhatsApp. Signal has almost the same interface like WhatsApp. It has encryption and a lot of more privacy than WhatsApp. Even Edward Snowden and Elon Musk recommended using Signal.

Use Signal

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2021

Signal is available on various platforms. It is available for mobile devices Android and iOS. It also has desktop applications for Windows, Mac and Linux. We don’t give any link for Linux Download. We will show the process here.

How to install Signal on Linux

To install Signal on Linux we can use the following method.

First of all we need to Install Signal’s official public software signing key by using following commands one by one:

wget -O- https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc |

sudo apt-key add -

The screenshot of the command is following:

This might take some time and ask for the root password.

After this we need to add Signal’s repository to our list of repositories by using following command:

echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial main" |
  sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list

We can copy and paste this command to our terminal to add the repository.

Then we just need to update our system by using following command:

sudo apt-get update

After the updating process complete we can install Signal desktop app by using following command:

sudo apt install signal-desktop

This will take some time to download (111 MB) and install.

After finishing the process we can find Signal desktop applications on our application list.

Now we just need to link our phone’s Signal app with our PC by scanning the QR code. It’s not like the WhatsApp Web, because in WhatsApp Web our both devices need to connect to the internet. Here after scanning we can use our PC as a primary device.

Our chats are saved on our device not in their server (like WhatsApp) so we can’t see the mobile chats on the PC.

Telegram

Telegram is already a very popular messaging and media sharing platform. We don’t think it needs any special introduction. It also supports cross platform. It also has mobile and desktop versions.

It is also available for mobiles on Play store and app store. Also it is available for Windows, Mac and Linux (64bit and 32bit).

It is also open-source and the source code is available on their GitHub repository.

How to install Telegram on Linux

To download it on our Linux system we just need to download it from the official website. Then we can download it’s Linux version (we are in 64 bit).

It will download a tar.xz compressed file. After downloading it we can find it on our Downloads folder. We need to extract the compressed file and we got two binary files as we can see in the following screenshot:

Here, we just need to double click on the “Telegram” file and it will be started. We can use it as a separate Telegram account or we can link our mobile devices via QR code. It will show us desktop notification of new chats.

Note: This installation of Telegram does not “install” the app on our system, but it will add a ‘Telegram’ app shortcut to our system app launcher/app menu. Just remember to not delete the binary file it links to!

There are some more privacy messengers on the market (Wikr, Utopia), but these are the most wanted. So we discussed these and their installation on Linux. We usually prefer Signal more than Telegram. Tell us about personal choice in the comment section.

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