Delta Tauri Blogpost #1146
Delta Tauri Blogpost #1146
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Check out the page preview at https://staging.delta.chat/1146/en/2025-07-20-delta-tauri-project |
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| title: DeltaTauri – Porting Delta Chat Desktop to Tauri. | |||
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| title: DeltaTauri – Porting Delta Chat Desktop to Tauri. | |
| title: DeltaTauri – Porting Delta Chat Desktop to Tauri |
| The size of the Flatpak download decreased, but the platform dependency increased by 54%, so the space-saving is not that huge, unless you also have other Flatpak apps using the gnome platform dependency. | ||
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I added it to the <figcaption>, is that enough? or should it be also/rather added to the image?
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Yes, I meant the images themselves.
But it's probably file.
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| | operating system & distribution format | Electron | Tauri | |
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Why is this a table, but the others are images?
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what do you mean with "others"? the charts for install- and download size or the screenshots in the previous table?
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Yes, I mean the comparison bar charts.
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| title: DeltaTauri – Porting Delta Chat Desktop to Tauri. | |||
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Here is a clickbait title for you (might need further adjustments, also of the excerpt)
| title: DeltaTauri – Porting Delta Chat Desktop to Tauri. | |
| title: DeltaTauri – how Delta Chat got even more Rusty |
| - It's written in Rust - memory safety and a strong type system gives you confidence to contribute. | ||
| - The rust package ecosystem has many great systems API crates that work really well and are easy to integrate. | ||
| - <!-- TODO: refine and merge this point with the previous one? --> more direct access to everything, like it is easy to contribute and leverage the underlying native APIs from rust, whereas with electron you would need more work, because there your backend code is written in JavaScript not C++, so you additionally need to add bindings for your new code. | ||
| - Confidence to contribute: |
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"Confidence to contribute" is already mentioned some lines before. Maybe change the wording in one of the 2 places?
| - missing camera and microphone support [deltachat-desktop#4932](https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-desktop/issues/4932#issuecomment-2927910551) [tauri#8426](https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/discussions/8426#discussioncomment-8268622) | ||
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| We tested the features that depend on system integration and documented the results in [deltachat-desktop#5239](https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-desktop/issues/5239). | ||
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In the first paragraph you "some bugs" but later they are "deal-braker".
It would be helpful to say something about the show-stopper. How are the chances they will be addressed "soonish" (especially the upstream issues).
Having no mic & speaker access will be even more severe if deltachat has calls.
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It would be helpful to say something about the show-stopper. How are the chances they will be addressed "soonish" (especially the upstream issues).
I guess it is unlikely that they are addressed soon, unless someone takes the initiative and drives such an effort.
For the issues that we can solve, it depends whether that is a priority for us:
- the disappearing attachments bug is likely a core bug that we should find and fix anyway, since it could also appear outside of tauri (in theory)
- single instance hand-off -> that's likely some rust scheduling issue in our code with async, I found that hard to debug, but I guess some of our rust experts could find it easily.
Having no mic & speaker access will be even more severe if deltachat has calls.
we could access those from rust directly, if we do calls with WebRTC then this will be more of a problem, unless we also want to use WebRTC from rust. (atleast on linux, on windows and mac WebRTC, camera and microphone work fine already)
| ### State of Tauri Edition | ||
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| The Tauri edition has all features that the electron version has besides of the location streaming map, but there are still some bugs especially on Linux. | ||
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What's the reason for the missing location streaming map? Just not implemented due to lack of time or are there technical limitations?
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lack of "time", basically I wanted to prototype an extension system for it instead of mixing it with the webxdc code. - but this was out of scope for the nlnet project.
the webxdc method could probably be implemented in a few days, but we should really use core's http proxy instead of allowing internet access and fetching the map tiles over the browser bypassing the proxy that the user set. (also the limitation of only allowing one instance per account is not that nice when it opens in a detached window deltachat/deltachat-desktop#3846 (comment))
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| There are quite some opinions floating around that Electron apps are bad because they "waste" too many resources. |
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Instead of quoting "opinions" floating around I would say "Electron apps are often critisized...
Co-authored-by: WofWca <[email protected]>
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In view of the fact that there are some show stoppers with an uncertain outlook the last 2 paragraphs (Status & Conclusion) should make clear that:
- Tauri is in beta status
- it is not an official deltachat client and Tauri maintenance is depending on voluntary community work
- there is no set timetable for how it can be brought to production readiness, as there are some upstream issues whose resolution is uncertain in terms of when and how they will be fixed
The "we" in the blog post is not really clear, it could give the impression that Delta Tauri was from the very first beginning planned as next step on the official roadmap of deltachat-desktop development, while it was and is a side project to find out if it could become a step of that roadmap.
TODO