Discord rolls out a nice improvement for video calls on Linux

With the most recent big stable update released for Discord, they rolled out a nice improvement for video calls on Linux making them better than ever.

The March 6 update for the popular chat app was quite a big one, filled with new features and bug fixes. But one particular change for Linux caught my eye:

"We recently shipped background replacement for video calls on Linux! You can now set your background to that sweet green binary stream from… uh… that one movie."

So yes, now you can add all sorts of backgrounds to get rid of the mess that is your gaming room. And it does seem to work well enough, although nowhere near perfect it's a good start to see it actually available fully on Linux now. Here's me just testing it out because a picture is worth a thousand words:

Some other highlights they noted include the app starting up a fair amount faster now:

• Ok, pull up a chair: we got a big’n to talk about. Until recently, using escaped mentions (like ”\@everyone”) wouldn’t get detected as a true mention on the client, but would absolutely mention a Role when sent. This was especially fun on large servers, where you wouldn’t get a warning that you were about to mention a lot of users. Messages like these would just… let themselves be sent and notify everyone with zero indication that it was going to happen. We discovered this first-hand when one of our engineers tried to make a joke in a meeting and inadvertently @’d a decent portion of the company. So now, we properly respect escape characters on the backend for @everyone and @here explicitly, so “\@everyone” won’t actually trigger a mention. For real this time.
• We changed the ordering of payloads from our API to Desktop clients, which reduced p50 TTI (aka: the median time it takes the app to launch) by 11.8%. Along with the navigation performance improvements from last week, we’re sorta developing a theme of Desktop performance wins to start this year!
• We’re in the midst of a thorough pass on Accessibility and have addressed many issues affecting the Quest, Events, Profiles, Activities, and Nitro surfaces. There were frankly too many changes to list each one for these particular surfaces in the Accessibility section. These changes should help users dependent on screen readers navigate these portions of Discord more effectively. (And of course, this is alongside everything else we fix up in the Accessibility section of Patch Notes.)

See the full patch notes for all the goodies.