Telegram

Telegram
is a cloud-based cross-platform instant messaging service with optional end-to-end encryption. Account creation requires a phone number.
Note
Although the telegram client(s) are open source, the server side is proprietary and centralised, therefore having privacy issues. Use at your own risk as data is controlled by a centralised company.
Installation
You can use one of following methods in order to use Telegram:
Graphical clients
Telegram Desktop
— The official application built by Arch Linux.
https://desktop.telegram.org
||
telegram-desktop
Kotatogram
— Unofficial experimental Telegram Desktop fork.
https://kotatogram.github.io/
||
kotatogram-desktop
AUR
64Gram
— Unofficial feature-rich Telegram Desktop fork.
https://64gr.am
||
64gram-desktop
AUR
Materialgram
— Telegram Desktop fork with material icons and some improvements.
https://github.com/kukuruzka165/materialgram
||
materialgram-bin
AUR
Yukigram
— Unofficial patch-based Telegram Desktop fork,with features from 64Gram and Kotatogram.
https://github.com/yukigram/yukigram
||
yukigram-desktop
AUR
Ayugram
— Desktop Telegram client with good customization and Ghost mode.
https://github.com/AyuGram/AyuGramDesktop
||
ayugram-desktop
AUR
Web-based clients
Two official browser-agnostic clients exist:
Telegram WebK
and
Telegram WebA
, while the
Telegram Chrome app
for
Chromium
-based browser is also available. There are also third-party clients:
Franz
— An
open-source
web-based application that can be used for various instant messaging software.
https://meetfranz.com/
||
franz
AUR
Hamsket
— A GPL-licensed alternative to Franz, forked from the last open sources of Rambox.
https://github.com/TheGoddessInari/hamsket
||
hamsket
AUR
Chat client plugins
Some multi-purpose chat clients provide a plugin for Telegram:
Pidgin
—
libpurple
AUR
Telegram plugin implemented using official tdlib client library. Needs TD_API_ID and TD_API_HASH env vars to be set for makepkg.
https://github.com/ars3niy/tdlib-purple
||
telegram-tdlib-purple-git
AUR
Command-line clients
Telegram messenger CLI
— A command-line interface for Telegram which uses the readline interface.
https://github.com/kenorb-contrib/tg
||
telegram-cli-git
AUR
tg
— Telegram terminal client.
https://github.com/paul-nameless/tg
||
telegram-tg
AUR
nchat
— A terminal-based chat client with support for Telegram.
https://github.com/d99kris/nchat
||
nchat-git
AUR
telega.el
— GNU Emacs Telegram client.
https://github.com/zevlg/telega.el
|| Available through
MELPA
telegram-send
— A command-line tool to directly send messages or files via Telegram.
https://github.com/rahiel/telegram-send
||
python-telegram-send
AUR
Tips and tricks
File chooser style
See
Qt#Configuration of Qt 5/6 applications under environments other than KDE Plasma
Wayland support
See
GNOME/Troubleshooting#Cursor size or theme issues on Wayland
.
See
Wayland#Qt
for generic instructions.
xdg-open scheme handler
If you want to use
xdg-open
for
t.me
links and receive an error not finding a handler for
tg
, run:
$ xdg-mime default org.telegram.desktop.desktop application/x-xdg-protocol-tg
$ xdg-mime default org.telegram.desktop.desktop x-scheme-handler/tg
Real-time priority
This article or section is out of date.
Reason:
Latest
openal
supports
rtkit
that allows to set priority for unprivileged processes (Discuss in
Talk:Telegram
)
If you get the following error:
$ Telegram
[ALSOFT] (EE) Failed to set real-time priority for thread: Operation not permitted (1)
Install
realtime-privileges
,
add
yourself to the
realtime
group and reboot. See
Realtime process management#Configuring PAM
for details.
HiDPI scaling
The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.
Reason:
This may lead to problems when opening files from Telegram (e.g. opening pdf with Okular will inherit the variable). (Discuss in
Talk:Telegram
)
This article or section is out of date.
Reason:
These instructions are likely not relevant to the modern Qt (Discuss in
Talk:Telegram
)
If you have Qt scaling enabled on your system, and the scaling factor is not an integer, you may encounter problems like
pixelated images and icons
. you may need to disable
high-DPI scaling
for Telegram separately.
Unset
QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS
environment variable
as follows:
$HOME/.local/share/applications/org.telegram.desktop.desktop
...
Exec=env -u QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS telegram-desktop -- %u
...
DBusActivatable=false
...
You may need to perform
Desktop entries#Update database of desktop entries
afterwards.
Also consider disabling
Default interface scale
in Settings and enabling
Enable precise High DPI scaling
in Settings ->
Advanced
->
Experimental settings
to avoid incorrect scaling when launch by
xdg-open
(e.g. opening
tg://
link).
Audio backend
As Telegram makes use of
OpenAL
, it is possible to configure the audio settings by editing its
config files
, i.e.
~/.config/alsoft.conf
, or the
environment variables
listed
here
.
In case sound is not working due to an invalid audio backend being used, it can be overwritten by setting the
environment variable
ALSOFT_DRIVERS
or the
drivers
property in the
[general]
section of the OpenAL config. The drivers value
"pulse,"
for example would try pulseaudio first and then fallback to the default driver list.
Fcitx support for Qt 6 Telegram
Telegram-desktop is built against Qt 6 since 3.4.2-2. Users upgrading from an older version might notice
Fcitx
stop working for this application. To make it work again, install
fcitx-qt6
AUR
. If using
Fcitx5
, install
fcitx5-im
.
Changing the default file browser
Telegram Desktop uses the
File Manager DBus Interface
to open the file browser. The spec does not allow to choose the preferred one, ensure you have only one file browser installed.
Do not confuse file browsers with file dialogs which are parts of toolkits and is covered by
#File chooser style
.
See also
Arch Linux
- Unofficial group for discussing everything about Arch Linux.
ArchWikiBot
- Inline bot for searching through ArchWiki pages.
Planet Arch Linux & News
- Channel with recent Planet Arch updates and Latest News in one place.
Arch Linux: Recent package updates
- Channel with recent package updates in Arch Linux repositories.