Discord Gets Massively Improved Linux Support and Official Fedora and Arch Packages

Discord has been available on Linux for a number of years, but it’s never been the smoothest experience—the Flatpak is often the focus of complaints, and the .deb installation comes with all the hassles of managing and updating the installation manually. In an announcement published to the official Discord YouTube channel, however, Discord has announced that it is introducing more comprehensive Linux support, starting with new packages and official support for both Fedora and Arch Linux, which should cover just about every mainstream platform that Discord might be installed on.

The Discord Linux client is also receiving a bunch of bug fixes and updates, not the least of which is proper hardware accelerated video encoding support for AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA GPUs. Screen and game capture now also use Gamescope or Vulkan directly, reducing the overhead and allowing games to use more of the available hardware that might otherwise be used by Discord. In the announcement, Discord more or less confirms these Linux changes came as a result of adoption of the Valve Steam Deck. Discord will also now automatically update, and it will be available to install via the Fedora RPM. Other miscellaneous updates include Wayland idle protocol support, universal hotkey support for push to talk, and audio and video capture improvements.