I know a few people who have been waiting for this! Discord, a newer chat app used by gamers now has an experimental Linux app ready for some testing.
I've tested it myself, and while it is nice it does have a number of issues like:
- No window buttons
- No tray icon on Ubuntu
- Their message notifications use a weird pop-up box rather than the native notifications area
- No menubar
- Really light text on a white background in places, same on their website, it's terrible
- Notification sounds for a user leaving or joining a voice channel don't seem to work
- A number of other issues
They do mention it's really early, and it will be improved upon.
I can see why an application like this is useful for sure, and I will probably keep using it. While I do like Teamspeak myself Discord seems to just make everything a lot easier. With friends lists, separated voice and text channels and more. A light and dark theme is great, but they really need more appearance options.
Everything feels very smooth once you learn the basics of the app, I really like it.
Feel free to join the "gamingonlinux" channel I created:
https://discord.gg/0rxBtcSOonvGzXr4
See their reddit post about it here.
Also, thanks to sigz in the comments for pointing it out there's actually an unofficial version on Github that works quite a bit better (in my tests) right now. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I've tested it myself, and while it is nice it does have a number of issues like:
- No window buttons
- No tray icon on Ubuntu
- Their message notifications use a weird pop-up box rather than the native notifications area
- No menubar
- Really light text on a white background in places, same on their website, it's terrible
- Notification sounds for a user leaving or joining a voice channel don't seem to work
- A number of other issues
They do mention it's really early, and it will be improved upon.
I can see why an application like this is useful for sure, and I will probably keep using it. While I do like Teamspeak myself Discord seems to just make everything a lot easier. With friends lists, separated voice and text channels and more. A light and dark theme is great, but they really need more appearance options.
Everything feels very smooth once you learn the basics of the app, I really like it.
Feel free to join the "gamingonlinux" channel I created:
https://discord.gg/0rxBtcSOonvGzXr4
See their reddit post about it here.
Also, thanks to sigz in the comments for pointing it out there's actually an unofficial version on Github that works quite a bit better (in my tests) right now. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Kimyrielle 26 Mar 2016
I am absolutely not a fan of using voice com when gaming, but a lot of people are. So it's great to see these applications getting supported in Linux, so Linux gamers aren't left out when playing cross-platform games.
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GustyGhost 26 Mar 2016
Okay so they say it themselves: Teamspeak is expensive and Skype is a hassle, why not just use Mumble?
4 Likes, Who?
Okay so they say it themselves: Teamspeak is expensive and Skype is a hassle, why not just use Mumble?When Discord works, it's way way more convenient then setting up a Mumble server.
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Okay so they say it themselves: Teamspeak is expensive and Skype is a hassle, why not just use Mumble?
They host everything for you, it's all at the click of a button and really easy to do.
1 Likes, Who?
actually the xnblank's app from github is more complete and fully functional discord client ( https://github.com/XNBlank/discord-linux )
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Doc Angelo 26 Mar 2016
free as in freedom?
No, which is why I would rather not use it. You get everything for "free", but in the end they will have to make money one way or the other. Maybe they will sell the service once it's popular, maybe they sell the personal data of the users. No one knows what they will do, but they won't do all this for free.
From their Terms of Service, chapter "Your Data":
By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using Your Data with the Services, you grant to us a nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use Your Data, subject to the Company’s Privacy Policy.
Other than that: The server as well as the client is proprietary. So we have to believe that everything is encrypted. Because we can't tell if that is really the case. All we can see is the communication between client and server, which may well be encrypted - but we don't know in what way and who can decrypt and read the communication.
Proprietary software and encryption practically exclude each other. One could use proprietary software which uses open source encryption tools for encrypting communications - which seems not to be the case with Discordia.
It seems easy to use and they don't charge you. But I will not use it, if I loose control over my data this way. And in the end: Mumble is of high quality, and it is not that hard to set up a server. Plus: There is plenty of Mumble-Hosting, if you don't want the hassle.
Last edited by Doc Angelo on 26 Mar 2016 at 6:14 pm UTC
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have used discord quite some time already, it works well, but the interface is a bit too bloat for my taste.
still great to see that there are more apps for linux than just mumble and teamspeak
still great to see that there are more apps for linux than just mumble and teamspeak
1 Likes, Who?
yeah I've noticed how it has no window buttons, just press the alt + left mouse click to move around etc. Looks like the next build should have the tray icon working.
BTW, I get native notifications quite nicely, but I'm also using Gala window manager with a gnome-session-flashback on ubuntu along with the wingpanel-indicator-notifications which seems to work out.
I'm assuming this would be nice in GNOME as well, this would be even better in Budgie because of the nice Raven notification pane, if only Budgie worked with gtk3 indicators.
I was only using this on occasion in Chrome to check on the status of Faeria before, it seems like a nice all around chat/communications hub.
I am a bit curious as to how they plan to make money with this service. if it was open sourced I bet we would have better functionality on Linux in quicker time.
Last edited by neowiz73 on 26 Mar 2016 at 7:38 pm UTC
BTW, I get native notifications quite nicely, but I'm also using Gala window manager with a gnome-session-flashback on ubuntu along with the wingpanel-indicator-notifications which seems to work out.
I'm assuming this would be nice in GNOME as well, this would be even better in Budgie because of the nice Raven notification pane, if only Budgie worked with gtk3 indicators.
I was only using this on occasion in Chrome to check on the status of Faeria before, it seems like a nice all around chat/communications hub.
I am a bit curious as to how they plan to make money with this service. if it was open sourced I bet we would have better functionality on Linux in quicker time.
Last edited by neowiz73 on 26 Mar 2016 at 7:38 pm UTC
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I am a bit curious as to how they plan to make money with this service. if it was open sourced I bet we would have better functionality on Linux in quicker time.
They answered this question recently they plan to have sound themes and skin themes sold on store rather than mine data ( but that's something that could always happen in 5 years from now if they are desperate or greedy ) as with everything digital trust is the biggest hurdle.
Last edited by on 27 Mar 2016 at 12:29 pm UTC
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ProfessorKaos64 27 Mar 2016
I saw the fork, but is there a reply for their main source code?
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Andrei (b1nzy) from Discord here, I'd be happy to answer any questions or address any concerns. This is still a super alpha version of the Linux client, we're actively working on getting feature parity with our other desktop clients in the coming weeks.
For a repo, the product isn't currently open source so there isn't one. XNBlanks repo was an (awesome) wrapper around our web version, but didn't have a lot of the internal native code we use for things like global hotkeys, better voice quality, etc.
We're extremely adamant on keeping the core product of Discord free forever, so you shouldn't fret over whether we're going to make you pay for the stuff we've already released; it's not gonna happen.
For encryption, you don't have to believe us telling you that stuff is encrypted, just take a look at our API docs (which will be dropping in the next couple weeks) or all the open-source libraries that implement both our API and voice layers. Right now we use SSL across the board for any communication, and nacl/libsodium for encrypting voice data.
For a repo, the product isn't currently open source so there isn't one. XNBlanks repo was an (awesome) wrapper around our web version, but didn't have a lot of the internal native code we use for things like global hotkeys, better voice quality, etc.
We're extremely adamant on keeping the core product of Discord free forever, so you shouldn't fret over whether we're going to make you pay for the stuff we've already released; it's not gonna happen.
For encryption, you don't have to believe us telling you that stuff is encrypted, just take a look at our API docs (which will be dropping in the next couple weeks) or all the open-source libraries that implement both our API and voice layers. Right now we use SSL across the board for any communication, and nacl/libsodium for encrypting voice data.
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Hi, Andrei.
Could we get an RPM package for RedHat/Fedora made available?
Could we get an RPM package for RedHat/Fedora made available?
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Some of my friends are starting to use Discord, and I wanted to download the app, but can't find it.
Is there only the web app left? Has the Linux client been canceled?
Even though Discord isn't open source, you could still provide a ppa, like webupd8 does this for Sublime Text (https://launchpad.net/~webupd8team/+archive/ubuntu/sublime-text-3)
Is there only the web app left? Has the Linux client been canceled?
Even though Discord isn't open source, you could still provide a ppa, like webupd8 does this for Sublime Text (https://launchpad.net/~webupd8team/+archive/ubuntu/sublime-text-3)
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