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:

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 Blame Discord for shipping an out-of-date version of Electron /shrug


  1. Chances are that it’s just a me problem and I haven’t configured voice properly. But still, it doesn’t just “work by default” (not that the official client does either).↩︎