[sliken]

Wow, riot has a ways to go. With signal you install it from the app store, it creates an icon, you click on it. Similar for the desktop client, go to the chrome app store, click on it, and it tells you to use your phone to scan a barcode.

In both cases you can start chatting with any signal user in your address book in a minute or so, no expertise (other than using an app store) needed.

Tracked down the http://riot.im, it has a "try now button", that just scrolls you to the top. Didn't see any way to actually try it.

I tried the ubuntu app, they make you manually create your own /etc/apt/sources.list.d, from only the base URL. Then you have to know how to add the pgp key. Then apt-get update, apt-get install riot-web. Then... nothing. Nothing called riot or riot-web in the path. Thought maybe there would be a daemon running (it's called riot-web afterall). Can't find any processes running, nothing listening on a new socket. I track down /var/lib/dpkg/info/riot-web.list, look through the list and find they dropped a dir in /opt. So I run /opt/Riot/riot-web.

It worked, not exactly the kind of thing I'd ask random friends/family/colleagues to do though.