Last year, I cancelled my Spotify premium subscription and moved to Deezer. The music streaming services are more or less identical in terms of available tracks and features, but on Linux there is one big difference: Unlike Spotify, Deezer doesn’t have an official Linux desktop client.

It’s possible to use Deezer through a web browser on Linux, but personally I think it’s more convenient to have a desktop client. Thankfully, it’s possible to get the Deezer website to behave like a desktop client on Linux, and the solution is both simple and elegant.

Hello, webapp-manager

The good folks of Linux Mint is maintaining webapp-manager, which runs websites as if they were apps. My current distro of choice, Manjaro, comes with webapp-manager installed by default as “Web Apps”. So to get Deezer to run as a desktop application on Manjaro, just open Web Apps, click on the plus-button, enter the necessary information in the form, and off you go.

The Deezer website is now available as a proper desktop application, and it works like a charm. Even the media buttons on my keyboard worked out of the box.

I suspect that the Deezer desktop client for Windows and MacOS is just a thin native application that displays the Deezer web client anyway. So it shouldn’t be that much work for the Deezer developers to create an official Deezer client for Linux as well.