Discord on Alpine Linux

So I finally got Discord (and the official client, not 6cord or gtkcord) to work on Alpine Linux! Should work on any musl libc distribution, but I haven’t tested for any besides Alpine.

For those of you who don’t have experience with musl libc distributions or proprietary software, this is a big deal because most proprietary software is compiled with GNU libc (glibc for short). To vastly oversimplify, these programs will be expecting functionality provided by glibc and glibc only.

I don’t love the official Discord client. It takes up way too much space and I like working in the terminal regardless (which is why I’m often on 6cord). But each of these unofficial clients have their own problems. 6cord takes a while to switch between channels and the voice chat doesn’t work.¹ gtkcord4 is doing some weird stuff with keyrings (i.e. not remembering my login) and despite many attempts, it refuses to respect my theming preferences (maybe this is just a GTK problem). It’s technically against TOS too (not like I really care though). Still, I’m looking for any excuse to ditch Discord, or at least its official client. Hopefully one day this will happen.

Anyway, here’s how I did it:

• install gcompat and patchelf through doas apk add gcompat patchelf
• install Discord as a tarball through wget -O discord.tar.gz https://discord.com/api/download?platform=linux&format=tar.gz (or click on the link)
• cd to whatever directory contains discord-0.0.x.tar.gz (x is the version number). This file will be called discord.tar.gz if you fetched it using wget, in which case replace discord-0.0.x.tar.gz with discord.tar.gz.
• tar -xvzf discord-0.0.x.tar.gz
• cd Discord/
• patchelf --set-interpreter /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 Discord
• patchelf --add-needed libgcompat.so.0 Discord

You may need to run ldconfig and/or reboot for this to work.

To run Discord, do ./Discord --no-sandbox. I’m not sure if the --no-sandbox flag is necessary on Xorg-based systems, but it probably is required on Wayland (definitely is for Sway). Blame Discord for shipping an out-of-date version of Electron /shrug