FreeBSD Port of the deltachat-desktop App

Feature Proposal
1

Because FreeBSD 13 is already around the corner and supposedly a lot more suitable for desktop use.

A lot of GNU/Linux users seem to be looking at FreeBSD nowadays, and I also have the intention to move from Arch Linux to FreeBSD on my laptop once FreeBSD 13-RELEASE is available later this month.

I’m not sure what the exact catch is, but as it seems there has been a problem with Electron apps because of Python 2 as dependency having reached EOL, but it has been mentioned that this has recently been resolved.

I have started a thread at The FreeBSD Forums about it, thought that does not seem to be fruitful.

2

I don’t know what goes into bundling/building a software package for FreeBSD.
We use electron-builder for creating the packages for the other platforms (linux, macOS, windows) and it does not have an option to build for FreeBSD yet. So I think its the same as for flatpack, a custom script/repo that builds for freebsd. Is there a docker image of FreeBSD on github actions or some other reliable way to cross compile for it?

There is an issue at electron about FreeBSD that is still open Add FreeBSD support to electron · Issue #3797 · electron/electron · GitHub.

Either way I think someone would have to try to build it there and see what problems appear and if they are easily fixable.

For discussion on non-electron clients I recommend these two threads:
DeltaChat running on mobian (PineTab, PinePhone)
Are there any native linux desktop apps in the works?

1 Like
3

Docker runs on Linux and uses the same kernel as the host machine. One way is to use builds.sr.ht VM.

4

What makes it more suitable for desktop than previous releases? I have used it in the past on desktop without much problems already, switched to Linux mostly to run Android SDK inside Podman (Docker). Can’t see anything significant in FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE Release Notes | The FreeBSD Project from a quick glance. Makes sense to wait for release to avoid going through upgrade process immediately after installing though.

Another related topic:

I see you asked about KDE/Qt apps at Signal-Desktop / deltachat-desktop App | The FreeBSD Forums so KDeltaChat seems to be a good alternative if you want to compile it, but it is far from being ready. I use it daily, but it lacks many features, like notifications and attaching files, which I’m slowly adding.

FreeBSD has electron port, so you can actually compile the app from source, but it’s not straighforward as nobody did it yet:

There are no LibreSSL problems as in OpenBSD case though and I built the core with LibreSSL on a virtual machine in the past.

5

Totally over my head as I’m not a programmer or developer, but just an ordinary user. So hopefully someone else interested can have a look and make something happen.

@link2xt KDeltaChat seems to be promising, I’ll have a look once I have FreeBSD 13-RELEASE with KDE Plasma up and running.

Otherwise, if building Electron apps for FreeBSD is the problem, not running them, any clue what’s actually needed to run a prebuilt binary of the deltachat-desktop app?

6

BTW Has anyone tested if the Windows binary can be run with Wine?

7

generally yes, can be run with wine on linux at-least, but there might be font support libraries missing and the text was really buggy/glitched last time I tried.

8

Damned, there does not seem to be a proper solution unless a native client that simply can be compiled and packaged for FreeBSD becomes available.

9

So someone is playing around with getting the Signal-Desktop electron app to work on FreeBSD. Not sure if the provided info can be used on the deltachat-desktop app as well, as any of this is way over my head.

But as it seem the only real solution will be a native app anyway, so hopefully this is going to happen at some point.