Honestly I’ve never had an easier time getting that sort of thing to work than on linux. As soon as there’s a font installed providing emoji pretty much any program will pick up on that. Even got a Toki Pona font working just by installing it. Now I can IRC in languages no one speaks!
It’s almost exactly like that only if the tin hat guy would turn out to be right every single goddamn time in hindsight. RMS is… a character at best, but he sure has some predictive powers.