Whonix Electron user agent string

I am looking at using the Element (desktop) messenger for Matrix.

I have done some research and I know that Matrix servers collect the client’s user agent. In the case of Element desktop this is the user agent of Electron.

I can see that Electron is installed using npm:

According to the documentation the Electron available through npm is a binary that is prebuilt on Ubuntu:

When I download electron on my whonix-ws and inspect the electron file with ldd I see a lot of shared object dependencies from /lib/x86_64, so although the binaries are built on Ubuntu the dependencies are not statically linked and the actual executable will depend on the system running the binaries.

I would like to know if these “system shared objects” will be different between Whonix and Debian (or other Linux variants) or if these
are common across Linux? I want to know this because I would like to be sure that Whonix Electron does not prevent a different user agent string to other distributions as this would put us into a small group. My testing shows that the user agent on Debian 11 (Qubes) does not vary from Whonix 16 (Qubes) but I don’t have access to other systems to test.

Thanks for any help.

Same as Debian.

These details will be the same for Debian and Whonix. Whonix doesn’t do any modifications to NPM.

Since this question is unspecific to Whonix, it most likely needs to be resolved as per:

Thanks.

I found chromium’s user agent string generation code and have verified all Linux distributions should be equal.

content/common/user_agent.cc

1 Like