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I have been successfully updating discord by using the .deb it asks me to download as an 'update' every so often, but this is really weird to me. Shouldn't the .deb allow my package manager to track their repository, and therefore not need to download a new one at each update? Is there some setting that I don't have set that causes this to happen, or is this something on discord's end? This is one of the only packages that behaves this way for me.

EDIT: I was asked what the apt-cache policy returned for discord, so I ran that from a terminal and here are the results:

discord:
  Installed: 0.0.14
  Candidate: 0.0.14
  Version table:
 *** 0.0.14 100
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

I don't really know how to read this, but I note that there's no repository recorded here, where there ought to be if there was one, so I guess discord is sending individual programs out via its .debs rather than creating a repository for them to pull updates in from.

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  • 1
    Did you add a ppa for discord to your system sources list?
    – David
    Apr 6, 2021 at 15:26
  • +1 to @David. @LGS, please show the output of apt-cache policy discord. If it contains only 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status then you do not have software source for Discord.
    – N0rbert
    Apr 6, 2021 at 17:37
  • I just edited to add the return of that command. I'm guessing that I'll need a third-party ppa to keep discord up to date, as @David suggested. I'm going to self-answer so that this isn't an open question anymore unless one of you would like to do that.
    – LGS
    Apr 7, 2021 at 17:15
  • @N0rbert I did put an answer but was told it was no good so removed it.
    – David
    Apr 8, 2021 at 10:50

2 Answers 2

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Your output of apt-cache policy discord indicates that you have installed Discord using local deb-file. The system is not configured to have special sources.list for Discord, moreover Discord does not provide it.

So if you want automatic updates of Discord you have two options:

  • install Discord from FlatPak with

    sudo apt install flatpak
    flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
    flatpak install flathub com.discordapp.Discord
    
  • install Discord from Snap with

    snap install discord
    

But from my personal experience I can say that Discord releases its updates not too frequent, so it is acceptable to install it from downloaded deb-file. I'm doing so and happy with this. So you can leave things as they now is.

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  • I installed via snap and it still launched with the "Download" deb file option. They seem to be doing a lot more frequent releases these days.
    – Amir T
    Oct 21, 2023 at 1:43
  • I'm surprised that there's not an add-on to allow simple links/URL to be added to apt's sources.list, apt update would then check the file headers and install if there was some difference? Surely that has been done?
    – pbhj
    Oct 31, 2023 at 22:25
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    Not too often is old news! Lately, it's been asking me to download a new .deb file almost every week, super freaking annoying, and won't let you keep using the current/old version that it installed. Grrrr to discord lol
    – Yoseph
    Dec 13, 2023 at 0:24
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As personally I don't trust snaps, I have created an Ansible script to configure Discord to not complain about updates and update it automatically weekly, using a systemd timer.

https://gitlab.com/dustwolf/discord-update

The readme contains installation instructions, etc.

The solution is comparable to using a snap, but is not reliant on the centralised snap provider and does not create the overhead of snaps.

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