A while ago in November, it seems I missed a post from a user in the GamingOnLinux Discord server, noting that the Discord developers finally hooked up screen and audio sharing for Linux with Wayland.
Not yet released though, it seems it's only currently available in Discord Canary, their public testing environment, but anyone can download it and try it out. On the stable client, it just mentions that "Sounds may not be available when sharing a screen on your device", but when you use the Discord Canary client you'll actually see the tickbox to share audio on Linux now too:
Testing it with a couple community members myself using Discord Canary earlier today and — yep, it works perfectly. They could see my shared window and the audio playing from it. Excellent.
Once it's out in the proper stable Discord client, you and friends will be able to sit and chat with screens (or specific windows) and audio being shared properly on Wayland. Nice. I imagine there's many scenarios where this would be useful, and it's a feature many Linux users have been pestering Discord to sort for a while now with a suggestion on it open for 4 years.
No word on when it will be in the stable release yet though.
You can test it via the experimental Canary client from Flathub using these commands (taken from the GitHub):
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub-beta com.discordapp.DiscordCanary
flatpak override --user --socket=wayland com.discordapp.DiscordCanary
flatpak run com.discordapp.DiscordCanary
Havent checked with Lutris or other tools and there still might be some detection issues but looks much improved at least.
Speaking of, I just tried Steam's voice chat service for the first time ever on my Deck to chat with a friend... and it was immediately better than Discord's VC (audio quality, latency, stability). Steam even has a similar rooms structure where you can create text and voice channels akin to a Discord server. Unfortunately it's missing the crucial function of screensharing, this is something me and friends use a lot on Discord, so there's no chance in hell they'd consider switching over with that not implemented. I reckon after Valve is done focusing on Game Recording, that they should revisit and improve their chatting system, it has a lot of potential, especially considering the competition is just one shitty company that literally breaks GDPR by refusing to completely remove your data when you delete your account.
Last edited by Pyrate on 2 December 2024 at 6:21 pm UTC
Quoting: megaReally wish they'd just make a deb repository already so I don't have to manually update with the .deb method every other day. It seems like people ask for it all the time but they never respond to it for some reason.
you can modify
~/.config/discord/settings.jsonwith
"SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": trueso it stops nagging you and you can update it when you feel the need :)
Caldathras Dec 2
Quoting: Stormy178Love the update when I discovered it was working finally, when I was screen sharing with some friends the other day. Also to note it works on X11/Xorg DEs as well(confirmed on KDE Plasma 5 on Pop!OS)How's Plasma running on the Pop!_OS base for you? Any installation or maintenance quirks that you've noticed?
Quoting: PyrateStill can't believe there's no proper privacy friendly alternative to Discord. Matrix/Element is the closest I found but even that one is not there yet.Every time I tried Matrix, I found it to be pretty horribly designed. Their mod tools were rubbish, and their multi-room system was ridiculously bad that just strung multiple standalone rooms under a special heading and that was seemingly all it really did. Discord at least generally works well at its job.
ContainerRunner Dec 2
Quoting: megaReally wish they'd just make a deb repository already so I don't have to manually update with the .deb method every other day. It seems like people ask for it all the time but they never respond to it for some reason.
That why I switched to the Flatpak version. The maintainers get a notification for new releases and publish them very quick after it. As users, we can use Discover (KDE), flatpak update or similar without any other manual steps.
Finally, they fix a bug they've neglected for gods know how long.
Last edited by coolitic on 2 December 2024 at 7:13 pm UTC
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