Discord joke that it's The Year of the Linux Desktop

By Liam Dawe - 13 May 2026 at 8:09 am UTC

Last updated: 13 May 2026 at 8:13 am UTC

The Year of the Linux Desktop is finally here! Sort of. Well, not really but it's getting there and Discord has seen some nice improvements lately.

Don't come for me in the comments - I said what I said. The year is not here yet, I'll celebrate once we hit perhaps 10% of the desktop market share. At least according to Steam we're doing quite okay.

Anyway, what's up with Discord? Well, over the last few months they've been slowly upgrading the Linux version of their app to make it not suck so much. Back in December 2025 they improved Go Live video support to capture games directly along with the addition of hardware accelerated video encoding, in March 2026 they improved video calls for background replacement and in May 2026 they finally added an auto-updater instead of forcing people to re-download it each time.

There's a lot of smaller tweaks here and there like global hotkey support, improved Wayland support and more but those above are the main highlights.

To celebrate they did a silly little video, that's basically making a joke of themselves and how it took so long for the Linux app to get an updater:

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Anyway, be sure to join our Discord.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Native Linux, Apps, Discord, Misc

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About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. You can follow me personally on Mastodon [External Link].
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5 comments

Stella 1 hour ago

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so much time and effort went into distro packages that could've been used to make the flatpak better😫

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Eike 1 hour ago

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Quoting: Stellaso much time and effort went into distro packages that could've been used to make the flatpak better😫

🥰

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PlayingOnLinuxphone 1 hour ago

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For some people year of Linux desktop is when it reaches 5%, for others 10% or 20% or when Windows has less market share. But all these numbers do not care. The science call a movement to become successfully, when they have around 3% ([3.5% to be exact](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3.5%25_rule)), which we reached last year. And everything proves it. It became a public topic, more and more companies recognize Linux (as Discord) and jump on the hype train to benefit from it. Sorry to say, but the joke is over and everyone still not seeing it is just showing a random opinion without any facts why 10% or 20% is so special other than "is a great number to talk about".

It is kinda funny to see Discord jumping on the hype train, because the philosophy of Linux is everything against what Discord stands for. Privacy, Freedom, Free Knowledge - everything hurt very hard by Discord. I hope they earn the Big Brother Award 2026 to get a standpoint back from the Linux community.

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Ehvis 36 minutes ago

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The real joke is that the year of the Linux desktop was a long loooong time ago and people just missed it.

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hardpenguin 30 minutes ago

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I actually waited for some of these features for a long time so I am glad they are doing it

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