Want to see who is chatting in Discord on a Steam Deck or Linux desktop, while you're gaming or doing other things? Let me introduce you to the Discover Overlay.
Giving you quite a few options to tweak the style to your liking, you can display the avatar of people in your currently connected voice-chat, and text channels as well. It's really useful and makes it all incredibly easy to do. To give it a test and a brief guide because it really is simple to get going, check out this video below:
Direct Link
Full Steam Deck instructions on the official site. Note: it does not work together with the performance overlay.
There's fun little story behind some of the work involved here though, as it turns out one of the developers of the Discover Overlay is partly responsible for having the performance overlay on Steam Deck being a thing. I asked them about it, here's what they said:
As for our work targeting the Steam Deck... We realised pretty early after it was announced that we would 100% like to target it, it was just a question of how. After it became apparent that the deck would use Gamescope as it's compositor, trigg started looking into the feasibility of overlays with gamescope. In October he submitted a PR which laid the groundwork for getting external overlays running on the deck. This was later used as the foundation to get MangoApp running on the Deck - https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope/pull/363
We were pretty hyped about getting code into gamescope! After the official launch of the Deck we realised that we didn't actually have any way of testing whether our overlay actually runs on the Steam Deck or not. Thankfully we managed to get hold of one just over a week ago and work has been non-stop since then to get the overlay running perfectly, get the app in the Discover store & get a landing page setup for users to easily install the project!
You can download it easily for Linux / Steam Deck from Flathub or see the source and find other instructions on their GitHub page.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
TheRiddick Mar 22, 2022
There is a issue with this Discover Overlay, it requires the compositor to be enabled in order to work. In fullscreen apps this can create issues for many games that don't play nice with compositors.
I use Picom with Exp Backend and ReUndirection enabled and get nice and smooth framerate, without its a stuttery hell in MANY games. Mutter under Gnome does the same thing btw. Anyway Discover-Overlay renders a solid black background as a result.
I want to see a vulkan/opengl integrated discord overlay that works much like mangohud.. but that isn't this project.
TheRiddick Mar 24, 2022
Quoting: GuestI don't get the point of this as there are third-party discord clients that do this and more that work well on the Deck.
Like what? you are aware ALL discord clients have no functioning Linux In-Game Overlay option like windows does right?
Quoting: GuestI don't get the point of this as there are third-party discord clients that do this and more that work well on the Deck.using 3rd party clients also breaks the discord TOS. However, using Discover-Overlay does not. We just display data from the discord streamkit
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