Linux century marches on as Discord brings updater parity with Windows and easy installs for more distros

If you hang around with cool enough people, you might have heard it's the year of Linux on the desktop. But you heard wrong. It's the century of Linux on the desktop—it's apparent to anyone who can read the auguries: dads are becoming Linux-pilled, you can make HDR work now, and Framework says more people are buying the Ubuntu version of its latest laptop than the Windows one. Ignore that big Copy Fail vulnerability that got unearthed (and which many distros have since patched) recently. That's… look, no one's perfect, okay?

Anyway, here's another portent of Linux's inevitable ascent: Discord has finally made it less tedious to update its app on your distro of choice. In the bad old days—that is, the 11 years between Discord's first release and yesterday's patch notes—Linux users whose desktop Discord client needed updating would be confronted with a pop-up but no way to actually conduct the update quickly.

Where Windows users could hit a button and have Discord update itself, Linux users who weren't using the official Flatpak pretty much had to reinstall the whole app to get the latest version. Which was not great.

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But no more. Quoth Discord: "Are you a Linux user? If so, are you sick of that lovely modal we made to tell you that there’s an update you need to go manually install? IF SO, boy do I have good news for you. We’ve ported our Rust-based updater to Linux, allowing Linux to update itself just like on Windows."

Great news for anyone who hasn't already swapped the official app out for Vesktop. In addition to parity with Windows insofar as updates are concerned, Discord has also made the app easier to install across distros. The website now offers an .rpm package for users of Fedora, openSUSE, and other distros that, uh, use .rpm packages, as well as .pkg.tar.zst for users on Arch-y distros.

I'm an excitable sort who is prone to read too much into things, but still, I can't help but find this focus on Linux—even giving it an entry in the patch notes' highlights section (which isn't the first time Linux has been there, but still)—a bit promising, particularly in light of Linux recently hitting relatively big numbers in the Steam hardware survey. Slowly but surely, it's becoming big enough for consumers that major software developers can't afford to ignore it. Bring it on, I say.

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