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.