Linux century marches on as Discord brings updater parity with Windows and easy installs for more distros

Linus Torvalds holds a small PC onto the screen of which Discord has been photoshopped clumsily. — (Image credit: Jim Sugar via Getty Images / Discord)

If you hang around with cool enough people, you might have heard it's the year of Linux on the desktop. But you heard wrong. It's the century of Linux on the desktop—it's apparent to anyone who can read the auguries: dads are becoming Linux-pilled, you can make HDR work now, and Framework says more people are buying the Ubuntu version of its latest laptop than the Windows one. Ignore that big Copy Fail vulnerability that got unearthed (and which many distros have since patched) recently. That's… look, no one's perfect, okay?

Anyway, here's another portent of Linux's inevitable ascent: Discord has finally made it less tedious to update its app on your distro of choice. In the bad old days—that is, the 11 years between Discord's first release and yesterday's patch notes—Linux users whose desktop Discord client needed updating would be confronted with a pop-up but no way to actually conduct the update quickly.

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But no more. Quoth Discord: "Are you a Linux user? If so, are you sick of that lovely modal we made to tell you that there’s an update you need to go manually install? IF SO, boy do I have good news for you. We’ve ported our Rust-based updater to Linux, allowing Linux to update itself just like on Windows."

I'm an excitable sort who is prone to read too much into things, but still, I can't help but find this focus on Linux—even giving it an entry in the patch notes' highlights section (which isn't the first time Linux has been there, but still)—a bit promising, particularly in light of Linux recently hitting relatively big numbers in the Steam hardware survey. Slowly but surely, it's becoming big enough for consumers that major software developers can't afford to ignore it. Bring it on, I say.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.