Installing Telegram on Ubuntu

On Ubuntu 23.04, using the expected command line command to install Telegram actually installed a Snap package instead. But even that option seems to have been removed now.

sudo apt install desktop-telegram

If you don’t want to use a Snap, you can install a personal package archive (PPA) and install Telegram from a DEB file, using the apt command. We did this, and the version installed was Telegram 4.9. At the time of writing, this was the latest version available. Sometimes PPAs gets abandoned by their maintainers, and you can inadvertently install old versions of software. That doesn’t seem to be the case here.

To install the PPA, use this command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/telegram

We need to refresh our software lists so that the software available in that PPA is available to the apt command.

sudo apt update

Now, we can issue the command to install the Telegram desktop client.

sudo apt install telegram

• Press the Super key on your keyboard. Usually, this is the one between the left-hand Ctrl and Alt keys. In the GNOME search bar, start to type Telegram and you’ll see the Telegram icon appear.
• Click the icon to launch Telegram. If you right-click it, you can select “Add to Favorites” to have Telegram added to your dock.
• When Telegram launches, you can connect to your existing Telegram account. You need to install it and set it up on your cell phone first, if you don’t already have a Telegram account.
• Click the blue “Start Messaging” button to begin.

Installing Telegram Natively on Fedora

To install Telegram on Fedora as a regular RPM installation, first enable the RPM Fusion community-maintained repositories on your system.

sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm 

There’s a free and a non-free repository. We need to enable them both.

sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm 

Now we can use dnf to install the desktop client.

sudo dnf install telegram-desktop 

The version installed was 4.8.4, so it was a few versions behind the most current at the time of writing.

Installing Telegram Natively on Manjaro

Installing the Telegram desktop on Manjaro and other Arch-based distributions is as simple as issuing any other pacman command.

sudo pacman -S install telegram-desktop

The version we installed was 4.9, which was bang up to date at the time of our tests.

Installing Telegram as a Snap

Installing Telegram Desktop from the Ubuntu Software store installs a Snap.

You can also install a Snap version of Telegram on the command line of any distribution that has the snapd package installed, including Ubuntu.

The command is straightforward:

sudo snap install telegram-desktop

We can use the snap info option to look at the details of the installed software.

snap info telegram-desktop

The publisher of the Snap is Telegram itself. Scrolling down through the (rather long) description we find the version number. Not surprisingly, as this Snap is maintained by Telegram, it contained the latest version of their desktop client.

Installing Telegram as a Flatpak

If you’d prefer to use Flatpak instead of a native install or a Snap, Telegram has you covered for that, too. That is, as long as you have the flatpak system installed.

To install the Flatpak version of the Telegraph desktop client, use this command.

flatpak install flathub org.telegram.desktop 

As with the Snap version, the Flatpak contained the current latest version of Telegram.

Installing a Distribution Agnostic Linux Binary

The final option you have is to download and install a distribution-agnostic binary. You can get it from the Telegram site by clicking the big blue “Get Telegram for Linux x64.”

Change into the directory you downloaded the file to. If you’ve kept your browser’s defaults, this will usually be your “Downloads” directory. Check what the file name is. The numbers are the version number of the Telegram desktop client.

cd ~/Downloads
ls

The file is a compressed archive file, so we’ll need to unpack it. We can do this with the tar command. Make sure you use the correct filename for your download. You could use tab completion to ensure the filename is correct in the command.

tar -xJvf tsetup.4.9.9.tar.xz

Now that we’ve extracted the contents of the downloaded archive, we need to move them to the “/opt” directory. We’ll create a new directory called “telegram” inside the “/opt” directory, and put the extracted files in there.

sudo mv Telegram /opt/telegram

Now we’ll create a link that points from the downloaded files to “/usr/bin/telegram” so that we can start the Telegram client by using the command “telegram” from a terminal window.

sudo ln -sf /opt/telegram/Telegram /usr/bin/telegram

Let’s try it out.

telegram

The Telegram desktop client starts, and its icon appears in the dock.

Right-click the icon and select “Pin to Dash” to always have the icon in your dock, so that you can launch it with a single click.