Discord delivers vastly improved Linux support with “Year of Linux Desktop” update

Discord’s Linux Support has been greatly improved

Discord has been available for Linux for years, but it hasn’t delivered a great experience. Yes, the Windows version is a memory hog, but the Linux version lacked broad distribution support, hardware video encoding, global hotkey support, and was honestly pretty flaky.

With Discord’s “Year of Linux Desktop” update, Discord now officially supports Debian, Fedora, and Arch. Furthermore, the app now supports video encoding for Intel, AMD, and Nvidia graphics cards. It also now uses Gamescope Vulkan for screenshots, massively reducing hardware overhead. Global hotkey support greatly improves “Push-To-Talk” support, and the Discord app will now automatically update on Linux. Support for the Wayland idle protocol has also been added.

Honestly, this “Year of the Linux Desktop” update was needed. With Linux growing in popularity amongst gamers, stronger software support was needed. Now, Steam Deck users can use Discord with less hardware overhead, improving their handhelds’ battery life. Desktop users can also benefit from improved hardware support and decreased overhead.

The irony of this update is that the Windows version of Discord also needs work. Discord is well known for consuming a lot of memory, which is a big problem for gamers with lower-end PCs. It’s also a big problem at a time when memory is insanely expensive. This is due to Discord’s use of the Electron Framework, which uses Chromium (Chrome) to create web-based apps. A native Windows codebase could be much more efficient/performant. That said, Discord isn’t the only app that has this issue on Windows…

You can join the discussion on Discord’s “Year of Linux” update on the OC3D Forums.