How to install Discord on Linux

In a relatively short time, Discord has become the favorite chat solution among gamers. That’s a fairly good thing. It’s easy to use and well supported across all platforms. Well, not quite. If you go to the Discord website at the time of writing this, there is one glaring omission from Discord’s list of available clients, Linux.

However, the Discord developers do plan on supporting Linux and have even released an experimental ‘canary’ version that you can install and use now. It’s definitely not perfect, but it does work fairly well, and, if you’re a gamer, why miss out?

Discord running on Ubuntu

Debian/Ubuntu

The Discord ‘canary’ release has actually been packaged for Debian based distributions. Users of Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, or any of their derivatives should have no problem simply downloading the package and installing it.

First, pull the .deb from the Discord website.

$ wget -O discord.deb "https://discordapp.com/api/download?platform=linux&format=deb"

Once it’s done downloading, just install it with dpkg.

$ sudo dpkg -i /path/to/discord.deb

That’s it! You should be able to open up and use Discord. Plus, since it’ a Debian package, it should be easy to upgrade to future releases.

Fedora

A Fedora user has packaged the Discord ‘canary’ release on a Copr repository, and it’s available for download. Like most of the others, this isn’t an official package.

# dnf copr enable vishalv/discord-canary
# dnf install discord-canary

Update: Since Discord has moved to an official release, the Copr repository still hasn’t updated. You can grab the archive provided by Discord here, and unpack it. A Discord binary is inside and ready to use. You can create a custom shortcut to it for your desktop or GNOME.



OpenSUSE

Discord hasn’t been packaged for OpenSUSE, but reports are that the Debian package can be easily converted with the Alien script. So, start off by getting the .deb.

$ wget -O discord.deb https://discordapp.com/api/download?platform=linux&format=deb

Then, use Alien to convert the .deb to an .rpm.

$ alien -r -c discord.deb

When Alien is finished, install the package with Yast2.

# yast2 -i discord-.rpm

It’s not exactly a perfect solution, but if you want a native Discord client on OpenSUSE, this is probably your best option.

Arch Linux

No, Discord isn’t officially packaged for Arch, but once again, the AUR comes to the rescue. You can navigate to the AUR page, https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/discord/, to download the snapshot, or just download it from https://dl.discordapp.net/apps/linux/0.0.1/discord-0.0.1.tar.gz. Of course, you will have to un-tar it into your build directory. Then cd in and build it with makepkg.

$ cd /path/to/discord
$ mkpkg -sri

Of course, you need to have your system configured to use the AUR first, and there are other ways to use the AUR if you want to. In any case, this method will get you a working Discord install on you Arch Linux system.



Gentoo

There is an ebuild available for Gentoo through an unofficial overlay. With that, you have two options. You can enable the overlay, or you can take just the ebuild and install it on a local overlay. Setting up a local overlay is a bit out of the scope of this guide, but you can find the ebuild here https://gpo.zugaina.org/AJAX/Ebuild/16383577. It’s categorized under x11-misc.

If you want to just add the overlay, you can do so using layman.

# layman -S
# layman -a anders-larsson

Then, add Discord to the accepted keywords.

In /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords

x11-misc/discord

After that, you will be able to emerge it like any other package.

# emerge --ask x11-misc/discord

If you went with the overlay, the ebuild should receive updates from the maintainer. If you chose to go local, you will have to check for them yourself.

Update: An official Discord package is now available for Gentoo. You can install it with Portage.

# emerge --ask discord-bin

Closing

This is still a very experimental release from Discord. There will be bugs, so do what the open source community is known for and collaborate. Report the bugs. That’s the best way to get full support in the future. As for now, you can join the conversation over your favorite games without needing to deal with a Windows client or leaving the browser open.



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