Recently, the voice & text chat app Discord released a pretty fun sounding new feature called "Go Live" which sadly seems like Linux will miss out on.
Go Live is a feature that allows you to share your game screen with a group of friends on a Discord channel, have them join the chat for it and watch you play. Like smaller and more intimate version of Twitch, only it's just for Discord.
Tweeting out about this new feature last week, the official Discord Twitter said "We just rolled out Go Live to... 100% of you! Everyone can now launch a game, click a button, and start streaming to their friends."
That 100% of people apparently didn't include Linux or Mac. When queried about it, an official Discord staff member said on Reddit "Go Live is a Windows 10 feature, will also be coming to Win7.". It wasn't noted in the changelog either, it was buried in their FAQ.
Not the first time Discord has ignored Linux for a feature. None of their store or Nitro game features work on Linux, which has caused issues for a few developers doing Early Access through Discord that wanted to provide Linux builds. A quick example that I can actually mention in public is Vagrus, so they added an additional option to tick on Fig for Linux users to get access from itch.io. It's the constant little barriers like this, that do put some off using and supporting Linux so it's a real shame.
Note: If you do wish to see the Discord Store features supported on Linux there's a request for it here.
Heck, Discord haven't even been able to get spellchecking supported in the Linux version despite the open source Hunspell being around and no doubt others they could hook into.
Before you go throwing Discord under a bus and gathering any pitchforks though, it's worth noting that Valve still haven't even managed to get their own Steam broadcasting feature into the Linux client. So Discord certainly aren't alone in not being able to do support such a thing on Linux.
Hat tip to ryao.
Last edited by legluondunet on 11 September 2019 at 7:46 pm UTC
Edit: typo
Last edited by Caenth on 11 September 2019 at 9:55 pm UTC
This is a good thing. It is a good thing because it erodes people's faith in an untrustworthy black box.
But that's the life of using Linux. It's not a bad thing. Being the mainstream OS with the hordes of consumer low-hanging fruit normies would only serve to kill everything that makes Linux good.
Quoting: HoriI think it's finally time to switch to W7.
Not a bad idea if you have to dual boot. I still have Win7 for very few things (MMO mouse keybinds, GPS map update).
Even their basic screen sharing isn't working properly on Linux (but it does if you use chrome) and hasn't been for years. They don't even bother. Or spell check. Discord just doesn't care about linux anymore but sadly they're not going anywhere until they upset the windows users enough like Skype did.
I couldn't join the stream mind you, clicking what looked like a voice chat channel did... zilch.
Turns out you can only stream from Windows 10 and only watch using Chromium.
At least in this instance the stream was suffering from /packet loss throughout, causing drops in video quality and cuts in audio.
So far I'm not impressed.
It's a shame Discord has become the norm for game devs as well as streamers to use, it will be damn hard to get people to use anything else.
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