Telegram

Telegram is a cloud-based cross-platform instant messaging service with optional end-to-end encryption. Account creation requires a phone number.

The official clients are open-source but the code for recent versions is not always immediately published. The server-side code is proprietary.

Installation

You can use one of following methods in order to use Telegram:

Chat client plugins

By using the telegram-tdlib-purple-git^AUR package, connection to Telegram through (graphical or command-line) messenger software based on libpurple such as Pidgin is provided.
Messaging apps that are using Telepathy can make use of telepathy-haze package, which provides possibility of using libpurple and thus telegram-tdlib-purple-git^AUR to connect Telegram.
In the KDE desktop environment using telepathy-morse provides capability of connecting the default messenger to Telegram.

Graphical clients

The official application built by Arch Linux: telegram-desktop.

Third-party clients:

kepka-git^AUR
kotatogram-desktop-bin^AUR, kotatogram-desktop^AUR, kotatogram-desktop-dynamic-bin^AUR

Command-line clients

telegram-cli-git^AUR provides command-line interface to connect and use Telegram. For more information about the program, visit the program page on Github.
nctelegram-git^AUR is a command-line interface for Telegram based on Ncurses and needs telegram-cli-git^AUR to run. For more information about the program, visit the program page on Github.
telegram-tg^AUR Telegram terminal client. For more information about the program, visit the program page on Github.
python-telegram-send^AUR, not a full client but a command-line tool to directly send messages or files via Telegram.
telega.el - GNU Emacs Telegram client.
TelegramTUI - terminal Telegam client with a pseudo-graphic GUI

Web-based clients

The official Telegram WebK.
The official Telegram WebZ.
franz^AUR is an open-source web-based application that can be used for web-based interface of various instant messaging software such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and more.
rambox-bin^AUR is an alternative to Franz, also open source. It offers all features of its counterpart.
Use Telegram Chrome app for Chromium, to connect to Telegram in your browser via web interface.

Tips and tricks

GTK dialogs in Telegram Desktop

If you want to use GTK file dialogs instead of Qt ones, install xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-gtk. See the relevant upstream wiki page for details.

SVG icon theme in Telegram Desktop

If you want to use an icon theme based on svg image (e.g. papirus-icon-theme) install qt5-svg. See Qt#Icon theme is not applied for details.

Wayland support

See Wayland#Qt for instructions.

xdg-open in Telegram Desktop

If you want to use xdg-open on t.me links and receive an error not finding a handler for tg:

xdg-mime default telegramdesktop.desktop application/x-xdg-protocol-tg
xdg-mime default telegramdesktop.desktop x-scheme-handler/tg

Failed to set real-time priority for thread: Operation not permitted

If you get the following error

$ telegram-desktop

[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

If you have QT scaling enabled on your system, you may need to disable high-DPI scaling for Telegram separately.

Copy desktop entry to user-specific folder,

cp /usr/share/applications/telegramdesktop.desktop $HOME/.local/share/applications/telegramdesktop-no-scaling.desktop

Edit Exec= line as follows,

$HOME/.local/share/applications/telegramdesktop-no-scaling.desktop

Exec=env -u QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS telegram-desktop -- %u

You may need to update database of desktop entries.

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.

Choose correct web camera

Telegram version 3.7.1 does not allow to select the web camera to use in video conference. If you want to force telegram to use a different camera, as a workaround you can disable the unwanted camera device as described in [1].