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Summary
Telegram is a chat client developed with security and privacy in mind. It’s mainly used on cell phones, but it does have desktop clients, too. Here’s how to install it on Linux.
The Telegram Client, Security, and Privacy
Privacy and security are two different things. Privacy means controlling the information and data about you, and choosing who, if anyone, has access to it. Security is one of the tools you can use to maintain your privacy. Another tool you can use is making wise choices.
It’s no secret that if an online service is free, it’s because you are the product. The price for using the service is hidden in their terms and conditions. By using the service, you give the service provider permission to gather what it likes about you, and to do what it wants with that data, including sharing it with the provider’s “trusted partners.”
At its least sinister, the data profiling is used totarget you with advertising. But that’s not always the case. One famous example is theCambridge Analytica scandal. The personal data of 87 million Facebook users was used in an attempt to benefit two presidential candidates in 2016.
Telegramhas end-to-end encryption, implemented using their own protocol. This isn’t open source (unlike Signal’s encryption protocol) so it hasn’t been reviewed by anyone but Telegram. Also, messages aren’t encrypted by default. You need to use the secret chat feature if you want that level of protection.
Telegram gathers information on its user base, but how much information you part with depends on which functions of Telegram you want to use. If you want to provide a recovery email address in case you forget your password, clearly you’ll have to relinquish your email address. Developers can create small in-app services called bots. If you use any of them, be aware you’ll be sharing some data with the developers of the bot.
Telegram gathers more data than Signal does, but considerably less than WhatsApp does. You can see what data Telegram gathers and how they use that data in theirPrivacy Policy.
Related:What is Telegram and Why Should You Try It?
Installing Telegram on Ubuntu
On Ubuntu 23.04, using the expected command line command to install Telegram actually installed a Snap package instead. But even that option seems to have been removed now.
If you don’t want to use a Snap, you caninstall a personal package archive (PPA)and install Telegram from aDEB file, using the apt command. We did this, and the version installed was Telegram 4.9. At the time of writing, this was thelatest version available. Sometimes PPAs gets abandoned by their maintainers, and you may inadvertently install old versions of software. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.
To install the PPA, use this command:
We need to refresh our software lists so that the software available in that PPA is available to the apt command.
Now, we can issue the command to install the Telegram desktop client.
Press the Super key on your keyboard. Usually, this is the one between the left-hand Ctrl and Alt keys. In the GNOME search bar, start to type Telegram and you’ll see the Telegram icon appear.
Click the icon to launch Telegram. If you right-click it, you’re able to select “Add to Favorites” to have Telegram added to your dock.
When Telegram launches, you’re able to connect to your existing Telegram account. You need toinstall it and set it up on your cell phonefirst, if you don’t already have a Telegram account.
Click the blue “Start Messaging” button to begin.
Installing Telegram Natively on Fedora
To install Telegram on Fedora as a regular RPM installation, first enable the RPM Fusion community-maintained repositories on your system.
There’s a free and a non-free repository. We need to enable them both.
Now we can use dnf to install the desktop client.
The version installed was 4.8.4, so it was a few versions behind the most current at the time of writing.
Installing Telegram Natively on Manjaro
Installing the Telegram desktop on Manjaro and other Arch-based distributions is as simple as issuing any other pacman command.
The version we installed was 4.9, which was bang up to date at the time of our tests.
Installing Telegram as a Snap
Installing Telegram Desktop from the Ubuntu Software store installsa Snap.
You can also install a Snap version of Telegram on the command line of any distribution that has the snapd package installed, including Ubuntu.
The command is straightforward:
We can use the snap info option to look at the details of the installed software.
The publisher of the Snap is Telegram itself. Scrolling down through the (rather long) description we find the version number.
Not surprisingly, as this Snap is maintained by Telegram, it contained the latest version of their desktop client.
Related:How to Work With Snap Packages on Linux
Installing Telegram as a Flatpak
If you’d prefer to useFlatpakinstead of a native install or a Snap, Telegram has you covered for that, too. That is, as long as you have the flatpak system installed.
To install the Flatpak version of the Telegraph desktop client, use this command.
As with the Snap version, the Flatpak contained the current latest version of Telegram.
Related:What is a Flatpak in Linux and How Do You Install One?
Installing a Distribution Agnostic Linux Binary
The final option you have is to download and install a distribution-agnostic binary. you’re able to get it from theTelegram siteby clicking the big blue “Get Telegram for Linux x64.”
Change into the directory you downloaded the file to. If you’ve kept your browser’s defaults, this will usually be your “Downloads” directory. Check what the file name is. The numbers are the version number of the Telegram desktop client.
The file is acompressed archive file, so we’ll need to unpack it. We can do this with the tar command. verify you use the correct filename for your download. You could usetab completionto ensure the filename is correct in the command.
Now that we’ve extracted the contents of the downloaded archive, we need to move them to the “/opt” directory. We’ll create a new directory called “telegram” inside the “/opt” directory, and put the extracted files in there.
Now we’ll create a link that points from the downloaded files to “/usr/bin/telegram” so that we can start the Telegram client by using the command “telegram” from a terminal window.
Let’s try it out.
The Telegram desktop client starts, and its icon appears in the dock.
Right-click the icon and select “Pin to Dash” to always have the icon in your dock, so that you may launch it with a single click.
Privacy for Everyone
Compared to your cellphone, the desktop client gives you a bigger screen, a better keyboard, and access to desktop-only functionality such as keyboard shortcuts.
And, regardless of your preferences and likes or dislikes of the different packaging systems, there’s a way to get Telegram installed on your favored distribution.
