Would it be possible to package Wire Messenger and Wickr.Me or Wickr.Pro into the ISO of the Home editions?
Wire and Wickr do not force you to tie your messaging account to your phone number (which has your billing records), and both use super secure end-to-end strong encryption (Wire uses Whisper Systems - same as Signal).
Of course, end-users can be expected to install it - except that when it requires a reboot for it to work, that doesn’t help much when you are running it live. Even with the persistence option on bootup, added apps simply are “forgotten”.
wire is a good service but client is heavy compare to signal or telegram. As far as i know Wire uses electron engine so when you install it, you have to install the chromium engine and all dependencies. That is why the size of wire or any electron app is always bigger than 80mb.
Will Parrot maintain it? Likely no. We don’t have enough human resource for 3rd packages and packaging, maintaining electron applications is just pain in the ass.
Wire uses the same encryption protocol as Signal. (they changed it to that after version 1.x, many years ago).
Wire has more features than Signal.
Wire does not force you to bind it to your phone number (you can use an email instead).
I have used Wire in the browser, on Parrot, without any issues (except that’s not a suitable substitute because the browser version does not keep chats history/content when you would like it to).
Wire is definitely not slower than other encrypted apps like you suggest - it is no faster, no slower, than using Wickr or Whatsapp.
Regarding development - Wire has a very active development team (they have the resources).
The app is independently peer-reviewed every 6 months. How many messengers do you know of that are audited so often?
As for Telegram - it is not considered a “security app”, because it has no encryption for most functions. Therefore not a viable alternative (so of course it’s going to be faster, without encryption!). That’s why the title specifies “secure, encrypted messengers”. Telegram has no encrypted chat-rooms. One-on-one conversations are by default not encrypted - yes there is an option in 1-on-1 for “secret” mode, but it is an extra task - you have to remember to manually turn it on each time, and even in that mode, media content and files are still not encrypted (last time I checked).
Russia didn’t ban it because of it’s optional encryption in 1-1 (which is reportedly flawed), but because it makes it easy to organize protests - and Russia wants to continue to control it’s “democracy”.
With Telegram, you have to be careful when reading on their website - they are intentionally vague and omit key information - even most native English speakers don’t detect the subtleties in their wording.
Wire is far more transparent and up front about things.
With that out of the way,
it is not possible to run Parrot live and to install a Snap or Flatpak, as they often require a restart for some things to take effect.
I tried, and that was the notice in the terminal - that a restart was required.
And I noticed that even if you run it with persistence, with 512MB extra space, changes do not stick (this is not the topic of my post - maybe I am doing something wrong).
So there is no workaround available to users running Parrot live. We have to turn to Kodachi, which has Wire pre-installed (but not Wickr). And users tend to have both - Wire for the extra features that Wickr.me does not offer, and Wickr just because it has that large user base (but that will balance out over the years - Wire will likely take over in the long run).