Install Telegram on Ubuntu/Linux Mint

Telegram Desktop can be installed on Ubuntu/Linux Mint from the Ubuntu’s APT repository, but this way you will get a quite outdated version of the app.

Alternatively, you can install the latest version of the Telegram Desktop app using a Snap package manager, but it is disable in Linux Mint and there are some reasons for this (one, two).

This note shows how to install the latest version of the Telegram Desktop application on any Linux distribution, incl. Ubuntu and Linux Mint, from the official tsetup.*.tar.xz tarball and how to update the already installed application.

Cool Tip: How to install Telegram on Ubuntu from APT repository! Read more →

Download & Install Telegram on Linux

Download the latest version of the Telegram Desktop setup tarball from the official website:

$ cd ~/Downloads/
$ wget https://telegram.org/dl/desktop/linux -O tsetup.tar.xz

Extract the tarball to /opt/telegram-desktop:

$ tar -xvf tsetup*.tar.xz 
$ sudo mv Telegram /opt/telegram-desktop

Once extracted, the /opt/telegram-desktop directory will store two binary files:

• /opt/telegram-desktop/Telegram
• /opt/telegram-desktop/Updater

Make yourself the owner of the /opt/telegram-desktop directory to not being prompted for a password during an auto-update of the app:

$ sudo chown <username>:<username> -R /opt/telegram-desktop

Optionally, you can create a symbolic link to the Telegram app launcher in /usr/local/bin directory, which will allow us to run the telegram-desktop command in a terminal regardless of your present working directory:

$ sudo ln -sf /opt/telegram-desktop/Telegram /usr/local/bin/telegram-desktop

Start the Telegram by executing this command:

$ telegram-desktop
- or -
$ /opt/telegram-desktop/Telegram

On the first execution, the command above creates the “Telegram Desktop” launcher in the “Applications” menu, so the next time it can be started from there, and also it creates the ~/.local/share/TelegramDesktop/ directory that will be used to store all of the Telegram user data and app settings.

Update Telegram on Linux

When a new version of the Telegram Desktop is released the “Updater” will automatically update the app’s binaries in the /opt/telegram-desktop (may prompt you for a password).

But if you see a message as follows you may need to update it manually:

Please update your app to the latest version. The version you are using is out of date and will no longer work. If you don’t know how to update your app go to https://telegram.org/dl and install thee latest version of the official app.

To update the Telegram Desktop manually, simply download and unpack the latest version of the tsetup.*.tar.xz tarball from the official website and replace the files in /opt/telegram-desktop:

$ cd ~/Downloads/
$ wget https://telegram.org/dl/desktop/linux -O tsetup.tar.xz
$ tar -xvf tsetup*.tar.xz 
$ sudo mv Telegram /opt/telegram-desktop

Execute the following command to complete the update of the Telegram Desktop app:

$ /opt/telegram-desktop/Updater

Cool Tip: How to send messages form the Linux command-line through the Telegram API! Create your personal notification bot! Read more →