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Telegram Desktop
Telegram is a popular messaging protocol with encryption and security as its key focus.
Fast and secure desktop app, perfectly synced with your mobile phone.
Scale to fit:
Phone Compatibility:
3 of 5 Points, some parts are not phone optimized
It is a Qt based app, so it is not fully compatible to Phosh.
How to install:
APT:
sudo apt update sudo apt install telegram-desktop
Flatpak:
Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.telegram.desktop
Command:
# You will need to trust and add flathub to flatpak flatpak install flathub org.telegram.desktop
Website:
Repo:
Known issues
This app will draw its own titlebar by default, instead of relying on system-wide settings, causing the text input field to be fully masked by the on-screen keyboard
This can be changed by going into Settings
→ Advanced
and checking the Use system window frame
box.
Tips and Tricks
Unfortunately, the Telegram desktop client by default does not run in the background, i.e. if you close the window, you are offline. However, telegram-desktop
has a -startintray
argument, which starts it hidden in the background, without spawning a window. If you do spawn a window afterwards e.g. via the menu icon and close it again, it also closes the background service. To prevent this, we can use the -startintray
argument in a systemd service to always keep the service running (or more acurately keep spawning it), even if you close the window.
For this, create a systemd user directory with mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user
. Then place following service file in ~/.config/systemd/user/telegram.service
:
[Unit] Description=Telegram in Background [Service] Restart=always ExecStart=/usr/bin/telegram-desktop -startintray [Install] WantedBy=default.target
Finally, enable the service. This will also spawn telegram in the background after rebooting the phone:
killall telegram-desktop # make sure telegram isn't currently running... systemctl --user enable telegram.service # enable the service systemctl --user start telegram.service # start telegram in background