Discord is a really well-put-together app, has text and voice chat that do their jobs, and get out of the way. The only complaint I have is that there's little to no support for searching history, but for an app focusing on live "community" chats, that seems a reasonable compromise.
The Discord developers are working on this. It's not just web components but also native dependencies as well, so it's understandable I think if the Linux version comes in a little bit behind macOS and Windows versions where the majority of the gamer market is.
Next up, I'm starting to like when companies use desktop HTML5 apps. HTML and JavaScript does enable developers to move quickly with their interfaces, and I find them to be generally much more well-kept than native counterparts, where there's more inertia in making interface changes. A good comparison gamers will be familiar with is Steam. The Steam UI is written in a valve-proprietary, CSS-like language that I imagine is less performant than CSS. It's also REALLY buggy, so much so that I'm surprised that Valve has not already moved to an Electron app for Steam. If they did they'd be able to iterate quickly on interface improvements which they certainly don't do now.
Discord works in a browser or with the native apps. Just visit the website and click 'Open Discord in your browser'
We have been completely happy with the switch, in special the ability to hop into voice chat with remote coworkers with one mouse click.
It looks like we will be able to use Discord when you add search. Seriously, tell the management to think about it being an alternative to Slack. We are a paying Slack customer and while they are better than hipchat/IRC, it is far from perfect.
Our top "wanted" features right now are video chat/screenshare, so that we can drop Hangouts entirely, and search. We wish we could pay you guys. Seriously.