[HowTo] Handle Discord Updates

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Difficulty: ☆☆☆☆☆

Every time Discord gets an update, we get one or two or a dozen posts about the situation. This tutorial is intended to be a quick link to drop in every time this happens, to make things quicker and easier for everyone.

Why isn’t Discord already up to date?

On Linux, the software that you use comes from online databases called repositories rather than the creators of the software themselves. The repositories that Manjaro uses are managed by the Manjaro Team, who are unfortunately human, and thus sometimes take a little while to move updates through.

Packages are intentionally held back for a while on the Stable branch, but don’t worry: Discord is special and gets to skip the line. You can expect your Discord updates to arrive before the next Stable update.

But Arch already has Discord on the latest version!

While Manjaro does get its packages from Arch, the Manjaro Team still has to push them out manually. The earlier statement about their humanity applies here too.

So how do I use Discord while I’m waiting?

Despite the app’s insistence that you must use the latest version, it is really not necessary to do so. Discord still works perfectly fine on a slightly out-of-date client to make the update rollout smoother. All we need to do is tell Discord to stop freaking out.

  1. Edit your Discord config at ~/.config/discord/settings.json, either in your preferred text editor or with

    nano ~/.config/discord/settings.json

  2. Create a new line right after the opening curly bracket {, with the following contents (don’t forget the comma!)

    "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true,
    The file should look something like this (click to view) 
    {
  "SKIP_HOST_UPDATE": true,
  "IS_MAXIMIZED": true,
  "IS_MINIMIZED": false,
  "WINDOW_BOUNDS": {
    "x": 320,
    "y": 269,
    "width": 1280,
    "height": 720
  },
  "MINIMIZE_TO_TRAY": false
}

  3. Restart Discord. You should be able to use it without issue now.

  4. Wait patiently for an update to arrive, usually within a few hours to a day. Please do not make a post about the issue, the Manjaro Team is well aware that Discord needs to be updated.

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Alternatively another solution is to:

  • download Discord from their website
  • extract it in your Home folder, somewhere you want
  • move the Discord.desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications/
  • edit the Discord.desktop file and change the executable path to match where you extracted Discord, and also change the path of the application icon.

This way it will be able to auto update itself when it needs to.

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