You have to install them manually, but it’s pretty easy thanks to yast and zypper.

I found it way easier compared to arch or even manjaro.

Signal uses the same E2E encryption as WhatsApp and is also not Open-Source. One could argue that not being owned by Meta makes it inherently more private, to which I would somewhat agree.

The most private Messaging-App would be some kind of federated Chat, like Jabber or Matrix, that you or a collection of family/friends can self-host.

Unfortunately, nobody uses those ¯\(ツ)/¯

Hosting the images directly on the lemmy/kbin instance creates imo unnecessary traffic to the servers. I don’t know if admins can disable selfhosting images, but considering the low-powered machines almost every instance is currently hosted on, I would assume it would be in everyones self-interest to outsource image hosting (at least for now).