Hey!

I manage the unofficial build at https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian

Debian is in the name, but scope has grown to all backends, compositors, etc.

The main reason must companies don't publish Linux electron apps is fragmentation. If you're doing anything more than rendering a webpage as an app, it starts to get complicated. I've got a bank of VM's setup for testing, and I still need it up.

• Aurornis

  today at 3:17 PM

  > The main reason must companies don't publish Linux electron apps is fragmentation. If you're doing anything more than rendering a webpage as an app, it starts to get complicated.

  Can confirm. At a past company we worked hard to release a Linux desktop client for our customers who wanted it, even though the number was small.

  It turns into compatibility hell very fast. You think you can target a couple recent Ubuntu releases and everything will be good, but then you’re getting peppered with complaints from people using distributions you’ve never heard of because some part of the app isn’t working right. So your engineers spend a half day installing that in a VM and debugging it, but the problem is in upstream somewhere. The number of tickets with Linux issues keeps growing and each one is taking more time to debug, all for a number of customers that is so small you can’t justify doing it.

  But those customers are angry. And vocal. They’re posting all over Twitter, Hacker News, and Reddit about how your company’s software is garbage, without mentioning that they’re running an unknown distribution on a 13 year old ThinkPad.

  This even impacts open source projects. Several popular OSS Electron apps don’t work on many popular distros unless you set some command line workarounds, and even then it’s flakey. The open source projects get a pass because it’s open source, but if your company releases something you might be picking up a lot of angry, vocal customers that you didn’t want.

  • aaddrick

    today at 4:07 PM

    Yeah. I just dropped another repackaging repo for Wispr Flow. https://github.com/wispr-flow-linux/wispr-flow-linux

    A lot of that is keyboard shortcuts for push-to-talk. Easy right?

    X11 is mostly fine, but the world is moving into Wayland. Wayland doesn't have shortcuts native and relies on xdg-desktop-portal, which in turn relies on each backend to implement it's own version.

    COSMIC from the Pop!OS team's xdg-desktop-cosmic doesn't support GlobalShortcuts yet (might now, haven't checked in a bit). So XWayland for them.

    Tray icons? GNOME doesn't have a tray out of the box, but there's an extension. There's no standard for whether it's light mode or dark mode across distros and when you map out the options, no api's indicate whether the tray is light or dark while in light/dark mode. At some point you have to just accept it's not always perfect or patch in an override.

    • WD-42

      today at 4:35 PM

      A lot of us are happy gnome doesn’t support tray icons. We are sick of devs thinking their app is so important it needs a visual presence at all times. If I need your app I’ll bring it to the foreground, we have the technology.

      Global shortcuts definitely a pain point with Wayland but the portals are making progress.

      • jorvi

        today at 6:15 PM

        > A lot of us are happy gnome doesn’t support tray icons.

        A lot of us = very few people in total, apparently.

        There's a reason Dash to Dock and AppIndicator are packaged by default on most Gnome distros and overwhelmingly installed on those that don't have it. Even Gnome itself has started development on a native systray, although in classic Gnome NIH fashion they either want to implement a new standard or are were even considering using the deprecated snixembed standard instead of using what 99% of Linux does :+)

        (Technically they want it for pretty good reasons, but good luck forcing all Linux applications to implement yet another standard, especially the commercial applications)

        • hparadiz

          today at 6:17 PM

          The tray icon dock/panel in KDE is fully removable. You can just delete it. So the opposite of that is also a thing. No one is forcing you to always have a visual presence of a program. Even Windows let's you hide tray icons forever if you want.

      • aaddrick

        today at 4:49 PM

        Yeah, I don't want want to take away from anyone. The COSMIC team is doing amazing and hard work. I started dev on claude-desktop-debian with Pop!OS COSMIC as my daily. We're just in a weird spot for that particular issue right now. In 3 years, it'll be something else. That's the nature of fragmentation.

        While GNOME tray lovers and haters both exist, only one of those two groups is liable to submit an issue against my repo looking for help getting icons working correctly.

      • CamperBob2

        today at 5:04 PM

        How do I bring your app to the foreground if I can't see an icon anywhere? I just installed Ubuntu for the first time a few weeks ago and genuinely don't see how people are supposed to use it, coming from a Windows/Mac background. How does a Linux user know what's running, without going to a terminal and running top?

        The lack of desktop UI affordances in the leading "user-friendly" Linux distribution should be seen as a five-alarm fire by anyone interested in promoting wider Linux acceptance on the desktop. There are reasons why Linux can't get past low single-digit adoption no matter how badly Apple and Microsoft screw their users, and I'm sure the half-assed desktop UI is one of them.

        • WD-42

          today at 5:11 PM

          Did you try pressing the super key

        • bigyabai

          today at 5:19 PM

          > How do I bring your app to the foreground if I can't see an icon anywhere?

          On GNOME? Alt-tab, super overview, or click the dock icon. It's literally not any more complex than multitasking on an iPad.

          • CamperBob2

            today at 5:33 PM

            It's literally not any more complex than multitasking on an iPad.

            That point would hold some water if the iPad were intended as a first-class multitasking platform, like a desktop OS. I don't know what the 'super' key in GNOME is, and don't much care, because if that kind of thing isn't obvious it might as well not exist. Having never used *nix on a graphical desktop before, I'm just blown away by how primitive the experience is.

            Fortunately Claude Code was happy to install dash-to-panel for me when I asked it what the deal was with this particular flavor of airline food.

            • antonvs

              today at 6:07 PM

              You might be happier with a consumer OS.

            • WD-42

              today at 5:36 PM

              Oh please. The super key is the windows key. You come across as someone who has never used a computer before.

              • kskdkwjdkwkkds

                today at 6:07 PM

                I mean they admit being an AI user. Can’t expect much more from those guys.

            • bigyabai

              today at 5:41 PM

              > I don't know what the 'super' key in GNOME is, and don't care

              This is like having someone tell you that they refuse to use an iPad because the home button confuses them. That's your choice.

              I've used GNOME professionally for 7 years now, and I've taught kids to use it at robotics workshops. If you can believe it, many of them are unable to use macOS and Windows at all, because their school districts don't buy them laptops anymore. I'm sorry that GNOME isn't a carbon copy of your favorite OS, but it's not hard to use whatsoever.

      • jm4

        today at 4:44 PM

        I don't like tray icons. What I like less is an app that runs in the background anyway when I didn't ask it to and that behavior is hidden. It's infuriating to "quit" an app and it's still there. At least gnome finally addressed that with the little background apps widget.

  • trumpdong

    today at 4:25 PM

    Reminds me that I occasionally have to set _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 because it's not always inherited from my login shell. Otherwise Java windows won't display anything because I suppose Java waits for them to be reparented.

    • GrayShade

      today at 5:55 PM

      On systemd, you can use ~/.config/environment.d to set it. Don't rely on your shell.

  • jareklupinski

    today at 3:33 PM

    > they’re running an unknown distribution on a 13 year old ThinkPad.

    "Tony Stark can do it in a cave! With rocks!"

  • nbardy

    today at 3:27 PM

    This does feel like the perfect setup for Claude though.

    Much easier to create a vm testing swarm of 100 disitributions with llms

  • WD-42

    today at 4:30 PM

    Did you hire a Linux release engineer? Or was the situation the typical team of devs maining macOS that have never heard the term “Wayland” before plus That One Guy who switched to Ubuntu last year and advocated for it?

    There are companies that do this right. But it often requires a hire. Too many companies think they can just yolo it because Linux isn’t a serious OS or whatever and then are surprised when it doesn’t work out well.

    • jlokier

      today at 5:20 PM

      > Did you hire a Linux release engineer

      That's often a great idea!

      But a full time hire? The GP's post implies that wouldn't make business sense for them, as even half a day occasionally on it is too much...

      >> So your engineers spend a half day installing that in a VM and debugging it, but the problem is in upstream somewhere. The number of tickets with Linux issues keeps growing and each one is taking more time to debug, all for a number of customers that is so small you can’t justify doing it.

      Of course an experienced Linux release engineer can do it faster and more reliably. That's probably the cheaper option. But the business still has to decide their Linux customer or user base is large enough, or strategically worth supporting, to justify the cost however they do it.

      For many businesses even fractional Linux support is not justifiable for the small number of Linux users and support requests they're unable to handle. Though I can't imagine that being the case for Anthropic!

      (Hint: This is one of the things I consult on, if anyone is looking to pay for quality Linux release engineering and platform testing. I have hundreds of historical and current Linux VMs, multiple architectures old and new (esp. x86, ARM and RISC-V), some of them embedded, fairly deep knowledge of how the kernel and libraries work together, and test harnesses. Also I test some compiled applications for portability across other OSes and architectures, including Windows, MS-DOS, MacOS, BSDs, SunOS, HP-UX, etc. going all the way back to the early Unix lineage.)

    • eptcyka

      today at 4:52 PM

      Even for those who do this right, some things change under your feet because OSS maintainers of kernel feature A want to stop supporting V1 of A when V2 has been out for a decade. But the features missing in V2 are supposed to be provided by userspace B - and they are yet to tackle the functionality altogether. So now your app will just have to regress in features. It is very easy to ship OSS code as a maintainer of a project, it is very difficult to keep up with Linux as a developer unless you stick to libc. There is no one source of truth with regards to how things should work, there is no one roadmap, and maintainers care a lot more about complexity than maintaining feature parity of backwards compatibility. I do not blame them, but then it is difficult to target linux. Much easier to support a platform with guarantees and a shared vision. Saying this as someone who has only used Linux at home for 20 years.

      • jlokier

        today at 5:47 PM

        Thanks to the Linux kernel's extremely high backward compatibility, and virtually all the libraries being open source, you can ship old or frozen versions of libraries with your application if you have to. You can defensively set shipped binaries as fallbacks in the event the application is running on a newer system that dropped critical functionality, while using the distro version if that's more up to date and still has the functionality. You can do the same for auxiliary programs your application uses.

        I agree that sticking to libc is most reliable, if you can. But the experience is poor if you do that for desktop applications.

        There's no singular source of truth, but there's a de facto frontier of only a few mainstream distros, as well as upstream heads for your dependencies.

        It's extra work, but there are systematic workarounds to the feature drift over time and the tendancy of some open source projects to aggressively deprecate older functionality and older system compatilbilty.

        You can, to an extent, automate testing on newer versions of distros to be alerted when something no longer works, and often you can do this before the official distro release date.

        Unfortunately even libc is not reliable. Unless it's a static build, Glibc is often broken (with symbol version errors) when trying to run a binary compiled on one distro on another distro, or an older version of the same distro. Static binaries have other problems, though work very well if the application is self contained and isn't a GUI.

        One thing that I find works very compatibly, though, is OpenGL / Vulkan binary-compatibility across distros and versions. There was a lot of work done on making libGL something you can link to or dynamically load reliably and take it from there. The OpenGL extension spaghetti is an interesting problem from then on, but that's more to do with the individual user's GPU and GPU drivers, independent of the Linux distro or which OS it's running on.

        • physicsguy

          today at 6:02 PM

          > You can defensively set shipped binaries as fallbacks in the event the application is running on a newer system that dropped critical functionality

          Not if they're GPL licensed you can't. And that's a headache most commercial people do not want at all when trying to write software that's often for a marginal part of their audience anyway.

  • hparadiz

    today at 3:37 PM

    You compile for the lowest possible Linux kernel and bundle your libs. Don't use container formats for stuff like this. tar.gz with an installer script is king.

    I dunno why this is always so difficult.

    • aaddrick

      today at 4:55 PM

      It's mostly dealing with different backends\compositors\etc.

      My reply to the comment below outlines the shape of the problem.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436#48435801

  • esseph

    today at 6:03 PM

    Just ship a flatpak?

  • ai_slop_hater

    today at 4:44 PM

    [flagged]

  • seabrookmx

    today at 3:26 PM

    Flatpak mostly solves this for GUI apps.

    • Aurornis

      today at 3:31 PM

      It does not. You just get more vocal angry customers who hate Flatpak and hate you for using it.

      • Normal_gaussian

        today at 3:50 PM

        This feels analogous to the old Google latency improvement story - improve performance and p99 goes up, not down, because more people are now able to use your product.

        These angry customers are a symptom of having more customers; in this direction (compatibility) companies shouldn't be KPI'ing on angry customers.

        It is very legitimate that high compatibility means more very obscure, low value, high cost, bug reports that are hard to classify as such. And my gosh, I hate working with rude ticket writers.

        • Aurornis

          today at 4:06 PM

          > These angry customers are a symptom of having more customers;

          No, it's a symptom of having more of a very specific type of customer who is more demanding and difficult to please than your other customers.

          When you don't officially support Linux, the Linux users are not surprised. It's normal for them. They find other ways to use the product.

          When you do announce Linux support, you open Pandora's box of complaints. They're extra angry that you claim Linux support but it doesn't work perfectly on their unique combination of laptop, distro, display protocol, and window manager.

          You gained a small number of happy customers, but picked up a disproportionately large number of angry, vocal customers in the process.

          • tormeh

            today at 4:17 PM

            This is when you say "We support Ubuntu", and honestly that's fine.

            • trumpdong

              today at 4:31 PM

              Indeed. You make anything past that the customer's problem. I have a few Ubuntu apps that needed a bit of jiggery-pokery to make them run on not-Ubuntu.

      • asveikau

        today at 3:36 PM

        Can confirm, I hate flatpak

        • Loeffelmann

          today at 4:31 PM

          Why?

          • jm4

            today at 4:52 PM

            I'm not the one who hates flatpak, but I will point you to this comment a little further up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48435993

            Flatpak serves a need, there are plenty of users who like it and there are probably even more who just use it without thinking much about it. Personally, I like it for a few reasons: - Being able to install something dependency-heavy with just one package - Sandboxing - Getting a newer package than what my distro provides - Being able to update apps independently of the rest of the OS - Being able to easily install apps that my distro doesn't provide

            The people who hate it, especially without giving a reason, are largely irrelevant when flatpak is filling a need for so many other people. Design for the people who are using and who like your product. Make adjustments based on their feedback. Ignore the people who just make noise.

    • aaddrick

      today at 5:00 PM

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436#48435801

      Made comment about flatpack below the comment above.

• WD-42

  today at 3:03 PM

  > The main reason must companies don't publish Linux electron apps

  But they do? Companies don’t publish anything BUT electron apps. If desktop Linux gets anything from outside of FOSS, it’s electron. See Spotify, discord, slack, vscode… list goes on. I don’t think a for profit company has provided a GTK or qt app for Linux in the last 20 years.

  I applaud your efforts but this is a supposed trillion dollar company with a product that probably has thousands of electron apps in its training set. They should be paying you.

  • Aurornis

    today at 3:19 PM

    Electron apps don’t work well across all of the Linux distributions if you’re doing anything that isn’t very simple.

    The comment was that the Electron apps aren’t being released for Linux even when they exist because Linux is so much harder to support, even in Electron.

    If they don’t have resources (or desire) to keep the Electron app working on all the Linux distros then they definitely won’t have the resources to write a completely separate GTK app for the few Linux users.

    • WD-42

      today at 3:59 PM

      Anything that isn’t very simple? Like a llm chat interface? If zoom and Microsoft Teams of all people can do it, anthropic should be able to.

      Have you considered that maybe their code is just bad?

      • mastax

        today at 6:20 PM

        If all you want is a chat interface you can install Claude.ai as a PWA. The value proposition of the Claude desktop app includes being able to screenshot and interact with desktop app windows, the file system, etc. That drags you into desktop environment and compositor API hell.

      • thewebguyd

        today at 4:23 PM

        Microsoft gave up on teams for linux, the app that's available now is a community electron webapp wrapper, and Zoom isn't electron at all, its QT but they chose the path of only supporting a few distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, RedHat) and they also don't rely on system QT versions, they vendor it.

        If your app is open source, I say just build & test on one of the major distros and let the community port it to others. If its closed source, well, good luck. But if what the parent said is true, that you now collect a bunch of very vocal pissed off customers because you didn't support their favorite distro, then its just not worth it at the current marketshare that desktop Linux has.

        There's also the challenge of you just can't make any assumptions about what may be present or not on someone's Linux machine, even with the major distros.

        • WD-42

          today at 5:32 PM

          According to the latest SO dev survey Ubuntu has 28% market share among developers. Considering coding seems to be the one place LLMs have found product market fit, I’m not sure how you can make the argument that the market share is too small. For other companies, absolutely. For ones marketing towards developers, seems like a mistake.

          • thewebguyd

            today at 5:46 PM

            How many devs use or would use a GUI app vs. just claude code in the terminal? My guess is not too many.

            I personally think they should port it, but, the developer product does already run on Linux, in the terminal, as is the case with the majority of other dev tools.

      • today at 4:07 PM

      • today at 4:28 PM

    • redsocksfan45

      today at 4:09 PM

      [dead]

• _fat_santa

  today at 4:11 PM

  There's a similar project for Codex Desktop: https://github.com/ilysenko/codex-desktop-linux.

  After going through this process to get codex installed on Linux I'm honestly baffled why OpenAI doesn't have an official port. Though I haven't tested every part of the app, everything works as intended, even got computer use working without any issues.

• aaddrick

  today at 1:56 PM

  Still mess it up*

  Swipe keyboards on mobile are awful, but I can't break that habit.

  • tasuki

    today at 3:04 PM

    We have basically achieved AGI, but typing on mobile is still an unsolved problem. GBoard's dictionaries for Czech and Polish are still missing many usual declensions...

    • kskdkwjdkwkkds

      today at 6:12 PM

      > We have basically achieved AGI

      We haven’t.

  • Normal_gaussian

    today at 3:54 PM

    The old minuum keyboard was fantastic; now I'm forced to use a swipe keyboard I'm constantly making mistakes - but at least its faster than pecking.

  • Kye

    today at 2:09 PM

    For future reference: you can edit posts for up to 2 hours.

    • Normal_gaussian

      today at 3:53 PM

      Is that not karma gated?

  • freedomben

    today at 2:05 PM

    Nice, you have RPMs and DEBs in a remote repo we can add! Thanks for making it so easy to use :-)

    Also, I can't break the swipe keyboard habit either. It's the worst, but still better than the alternatives. Someday I hope physical keyboard makes a return (but I"m not holding my breath)

    • aaddrick

      today at 4:32 PM

      You're welcome!

  • today at 2:07 PM

• seabrookmx

  today at 3:30 PM

  Have you considered flatpak support? I know it's has its rough edges, but I use many apps across arch/Fedora/Ubuntu that are delivered as a single flatpak.

  • aaddrick

    today at 4:16 PM

    I've looked on the rare occasion, but no one is asking for it on the repo, so hadn't been a priority like other distribution channels.

    It's great that I can ship one item for all platforms, but Flatpack doesn't solve the compatibility discovery problem for me.

    More context in my reply to the comment linked here :https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436#48435661

• Levitating

  today at 5:47 PM

  > The main reason must companies don't publish Linux electron apps is fragmentation.

  flatpak!

• roryrjb

  today at 1:59 PM

  If OpenCode can do it, then Anthropic can do it.

• orhmeh09

  today at 4:37 PM

  Sounds like a job for a more capable LLM than Opus.

• jkwang

  today at 2:48 PM

  [flagged]

• sgt

  today at 2:37 PM

  Biggest problem with Linux apps - i.e. distributed with ease the way that Windows and macOS apps are distributed, is the lack of a stable ABI. If you asked me about this 20 years ago I'd say in 2026 there'd for sure be a stable ABI, but no.

  • seabrookmx

    today at 3:38 PM

    Everyone parrots this but I don't think it's true. The Linux kernel does famously have a stable ABI (we "don't break user space" after all).

    The issue is folks expect this to be at a higher level, so when libc or GTK or Qt etc. have breaking changes, all your apps using the old versions fail. This is a legitimate pain point with traditional distros.. I don't want to sound like I'm downplaying it.

    However, this is basically solved by flatpak (and others like it, eg snap) which contain _all_ these dependencies in the package. Layering (ala containers) is used for deduplication so you don't have 20 copies of a given GTK version.

    While MacOS provides the windowing toolkit etc. at the OS level, it's otherwise similar to how a .app file works. Installers aren't dropping dynamic libraries and resource files all over your disk, the app is "self-contained."

    • aaddrick

      today at 4:20 PM

      My reply to the comment below outlines the shape of the problem.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436#48435801

      • sgt

        today at 5:10 PM

        Agreed - it's not the flatpak itself, it's that whole fragmented ecosystem. And unstable ABI doesn't help.

  • WD-42

    today at 3:31 PM

    This isn’t an issue in practice because the software running on Linux is open source. Yes if you want to distribute proprietary binary blobs and have them work forever it’s going to be a challenge, but in that case better to stick with the binary blob operating system.

    • sgt

      today at 5:10 PM

      There's plenty of software running on Linux that is not open source, though.

      • WD-42

        today at 5:34 PM

        Such as?

        The only proprietary software I have running on my machine is electron apps, which are essentially bloated VMs. As we’ve seen from this thread, this is still apparently too great of an engineering feat for anthropic to tackle. I don’t think I’m unique in this regard.

  • est31

    today at 2:54 PM

    The stable Linux ABI is Win32 provided by Wine.

    • today at 3:39 PM

If only Anthropic had some kind of automated tool that was good at porting software

• shepherdjerred

  today at 4:23 PM

  Even if you can create infinite software you still have to be very intentional about what you’re choosing to work on.

  There’s still a cost to testing, support, planning, etc even if coding is now “free”

  • mmcnl

    today at 5:33 PM

    Anthropic claims 8-fold productivity increase since 2025. If even that isn't enough to enable support for Linux, I don't know what it is.

  • trumpdong

    today at 4:32 PM

    If only Anthropic had some kind of automated testing, support, planning machine.

• scrollop

  today at 5:17 PM

  Imagine if cutting edge AI companies could decide to using their world best AI to

  1) Develop software for linux

  2) Provide decent support

  • kskdkwjdkwkkds

    today at 6:16 PM

    It’s almost as if this whole productivity increase promised by AI is just marketing spiel, huh? Crazy.

  • zombot

    today at 5:39 PM

    If there were any truth to the marketing stories that say they have such a thing, then they could indeed.

• ameliaquining

  today at 2:07 PM

  It doesn't sound like that's the bottleneck.

• cookiengineer

  today at 2:27 PM

  You forgot the *allegedly in there.

• smrtinsert

  today at 2:58 PM

  Sorry that's not the use case anymore its about (checks notes) "forward deployed engineers", yep that's it. Go build!

  • supriyo-biswas

    today at 5:57 PM

    TBH I don't get the narrative there either. Earlier it was about how regular people can now build many types of software for themselves (and btw, I agree with this), but somehow the narrative has shifted to something like "regular software engineers would work with the customer to develop applications", which makes a lot less sense.

• Lionga

  today at 1:38 PM

  Use the existing Slop they have that needs 1GB of Ram for a simple Terminal app to create an even more slopped Linux app... If only they had any devs at their 500K and way up pay package that could actually write a simple app, that you know does not suck.

  • lioeters

    today at 3:13 PM

    Those highly paid human devs are hard at work on the Torment Nexus, which is their priority of course, you don't want China to win do you?

    • robby_w_g

      today at 4:29 PM

      Torment doomers claim that the commodification of humanity’s suffering will usher in a dark age, but quarterly earnings have never been higher. I trust that Death Star Inc has humanity’s best interests at heart.

  • delduca

    today at 2:02 PM

    You’re asking too much.

I'm still surprised at how many developers still turn their noses up at using Linux.

Like... You already use Docker and deploy to K8S... On Linux...

• tokioyoyo

  today at 5:57 PM

  That’s very much not the same thing though?

  • OsrsNeedsf2P

    today at 6:21 PM

    It kind of is?

    Why would you not want your development environment to be as close to your deployment environment as possible? Even MacOS bash commands have hiccups every so often. In my experience working with Linux developers, they seem to know the internals of the servers much better and can optimize/debug prod fast - and this understanding is only compounded with LLMs.

    I'm sure many developers would be equally talented at debugging such issues if we deployed on Windows or MacOS, but virtually no one does that.

What's the market for linux users who want an electron app so they can vibecode in a visual studio fork but wont just build it themselves nor do they want to clone and build someone else's repo

OK, just please be careful how you frame what you're asking for.

For software development use of Claude, I'd be happy if the `claude` CLI executable does everything I need, within the Linux KVM VM sandboxes I create for the work, without a desktop client. The cleaner and more trustworthy, the better.

Also, for random interactive use of Claude for asking questions, I use it from my host desktop, sandboxed within the Web browser, and I want that to be well-supported. Someone marketing/product person at an AI company will naturally want to dark-pattern push people towards a proprietary desktop client, but that's one corner of abuse potential that we can still keep in check.

For agentic automation of my host desktop things and the things they have access to... no, thank you, the state of the art is not ready for that.

• fragmede

  today at 5:35 PM

  The terribleness of VNC (vs RDP) is what gets you. A GUI client in that VM sucks to access. If it didn't, a GUI client wouldn't be easily rejectable.

  • e12e

    today at 6:11 PM

    So use RDP?

    https://www.xrdp.org/

    (Or x forwarding over ssh, or waypipie if you only need to access a gui application, not a desktop).

What do you miss from the Desktop app that the CLI doesn’t cover? I’m mostly on Linux too and have just been using the CLI, so I’m curious.

• SyneRyder

  today at 1:33 PM

  I don't think the CLI offers daily routines under the Anthropic subscription anymore?

  There's also the cross conversation memory search, which uses a different conversation dataset (the Claude Web / Claude.AI conversations) than Claude Code does. I'm not even sure Claude Code does cross conversation search?

  The Desktop interface also presents Markdown as formatted text and presents artifacts (especially interactive ones) better than the CLI can.

  All that said - I actually use the CLI for nearly everything (even on Windows). Rather than use Claude Desktop for daily "routines" that are capped at 15 total cron-jobs and use extra usage credits, I think I'll continue building my own minimal harness and move my routines to models from other providers.

  • filoleg

    today at 2:19 PM

    > I don't think the CLI offers daily routines under the Anthropic subscription anymore?

    It (Claude Code) does, I discovered it by accident recently, having never used daily routines before. Haven't touched Claude Desktop at all, outside of playing with it for 30 mins or so months ago.

    TLDR: I used Claude Code to build a command that scrapes job postings from a few employers I am interested in (it is a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist). At the end CC asked me "do you want me to re-run it daily?" I said yes, and it generated a daily routine and gave me a URL to my anthropic account page where I can see all my daily routines.

    There, it says that I am currently using up 1 out of 15 "free" daily routines that come with my personal subscription, and I would have to pay extra if I want to have more than 15 active at a time (I assume by switching to per-token pricing for anything beyond 15, but not sure).

  • Avicebron

    today at 2:18 PM

    > All that said - I actually use the CLI for nearly everything (even on Windows).

    I also haven't touched routines, but I use cc to write automation tasks that will integrate a model when I need an inference layer. Which I also did before routines..

    Have people actually been using routines effectively?

  • tstrimple

    today at 1:50 PM

    > There's also the cross conversation memory search, which uses a different conversation dataset (the Claude Web / Claude.AI conversations) than Claude Code does. I'm not even sure Claude Code does cross conversation search?

    This is one of the first things I “fixed” with skills and hooks. I index every conversation in SQLite and have a skill which knows what to do when I ask it to search the index. I had to avoid the word memory because it’s too tied up in other parts of the context. It even indexes across my different machines. I set this up because I have terrible context discipline. I’ll go off on a tangent in one context and start planning and sometimes implementing something based on that thread which really deserves its own context. Afterward I can create the new context and move relevant bits to it, but I’d lose that initial starting conversation which inherently has more data than the summary in the new context.

    I also use a few different related contexts. One where I’m building a game engine in zig and another talking about game ideas. There’s a lot of back and forth going on there which needs some shared context. I solve this with a combination of Claude.md references and that searchable session index.

    Everything I do with scheduled tasks are just wired up with systemd and simple scripts. No LLM in the critical execution path. Again a skill tells CC how I manage those scheduled things so I just have to say something like “run this every day at midnight” and CC has reliably taken care of the rest.

    • outofpaper

      today at 5:30 PM

      Why not just allow it to grep ~/.claude

• Recursing

  today at 1:34 PM

  1. Same experience as my non-Linux coworkers, so we can share learnings and processes

  2. Scheduled tasks that run locally ( https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13854387-schedule-rec... ) importantly different from Claude Code routines

  3. Multiple projects/isolated memories in the same folder

  4. Better UI

  • nozzlegear

    today at 2:04 PM

    > Scheduled tasks that run locally ( https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13854387-schedule-rec... ) importantly different from Claude Code routines

    What do people do with these? I don't use Claude but when I did I couldn't think of anything useful to do with the routines. I'm probably not being imaginative enough.

    • jeroenhd

      today at 4:56 PM

      At work, I have my Claude set up to go through the issue tracker, source control, dashboards, team Slack channels, calendar appointments, and have it look for things like upcoming scheduling issues and deadlines that might get tough. A lot of those services need a corporate VPN or access to my local machine for the LLM to get the information right.

      Nothing I can't do myself (and generally I do keep an eye on that sort of thing), but it did catch a holiday for my foreign team members that seemed to have gone unnoticed, and remarked about a status mismatch between Jira and source control that made the dashboard misrepresent progress. It's not much, but it's an extra little check that works quite well.

      Another trick I'm experimenting with is having Claude rebase my open PRs waiting for review every day, and auto-solving conflicts when they arise. I don't trust it enough to let it push code to the repository, but I think I have the prompt set up in such a way that I might soon start using it.

      • e12e

        today at 6:18 PM

        While not trying to recreate the infamous dropbox comment - if you already have Claude code, are on Linux - can't Claude write a cronjob/systemd task that invokes itself for you?

    • thewebguyd

      today at 4:46 PM

      Cowork is pretty useful for non-technical folk for things you'd traditionally just write a quick little bash or python script for (which really, is what Cowork is doing behind the scenes anyway).

      I've gotten good results using it at work for keeping track of expense receipts. I dump them into an "Inbox" folder and Claude will OCR them, convert any images to PDF, rename, and move them into year/month/date folders and classify them (cost centers, based on a mapping and examples I gave it). This runs daily, checking the Inbox directory for new items.

      My next step is getting it to pull them from my email automatically for me as well, or from a specific alias so when I take a pic of a receipt on the go I can just email it and have Claude rename and organize it for me, then it all gets sent off to AP at the end of the month.

      Non technical knowledge workers have all kinds of little admin tasks like that which Cowork can do for them, where previously they lacked the skills or will to just learn some python and script it themselves.

    • baq

      today at 2:30 PM

      I’d like the thing to read my mail twice a day and tell me if I missed something important.

      Haven’t set it up because I’m horrified by the thought of it reading my mail. Doubly so if it decides to do anything other than telling me if I missed something important.

    • Recursing

      today at 2:11 PM

      Some good ideas here: https://posthog.com/blog/making-claude-cowork-actually-usefu...

• dahkenangnon

  today at 1:39 PM

  The CLI is good for coding tasks but for other things non coding related, having the desktop app can be very useful

• davydm

  today at 1:27 PM

  Mainly: true sandbox separation. I don't want the model having full access to my machine. With a dump format that Claude understands, I'm able to pass only the files I want Claude to see, and he can't break any of them. I don't care about setting up access lists and so on. I don't trust that the cli product will be properly sanboxed and it's quite clear their software offerings are largely aigen code, and I catch bugs from Claude every day. I also get useful stuff, so it's worth it, but definitely not worth it, imo, to grant it any access to my machine.

  • mathstuf

    today at 1:30 PM

    There are a number of utilities for this. I use jai: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/ but also have seen nono: https://github.com/always-further/nono smolvm: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm zerobox https://github.com/afshinm/zerobox and matchlock https://github.com/jingkaihe/matchlock

    They all have pros and cons. Pick the one that suits you best. Then you're also agent harness flexible (I use opencode).

    • johnsonjo

      today at 2:11 PM

      As a jai and linux user, myself, looking at nono's os-sandbox (from here [1]) it seems nice too. Thanks for the recommend I was looking for something that might be nice on Mac and nono seems good to recommend to coworkers and the like.

      [1]: https://nono.sh/os-sandbox

    • sophrosyne42

      today at 3:02 PM

      I would like a solution that was itself not largely written by an AI

      • johnsonjo

        today at 5:39 PM

        Jai is not written by ai only it's website is. It's written by a Stanford Computer-Science professor with decades of C++ and Unix/linux experience.

        > [1]: Was jai written by an AI coding agent? No. While this web site was obviously made by an LLM (ChatGPT read the man page, asked some follow-up questions, and produced a prompt from which claude code built a vitepress site), jai itself was hand implemented by a Stanford computer science professor with decades of C++ and Unix/linux experience. As an experiment, the author did previously try vibe-coding a container, but the results were disastrous and repeatedly put his machine in a state that required a reboot (e.g., recursively changing the attributes of all mounts in the wrong mount namespace). The author does use coding agents to look for bugs, get feedback, and develop tests. However, rest assured that a single human understands every line of C++ in jai.

        [1] https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/faq.html

  • WhyNotHugo

    today at 1:31 PM

    The cli works on regular sandboxes just fine (podman, docker, bwrap, etc).

    Sandboxing a GUI is typically more operational overhead than sandboxing a cli (mounting compositor sockets, GPU access, etc).

  • jeena

    today at 1:39 PM

    I made myself a very simple one from the start when I realized it can access everything on my computer https://git.jeena.net/jeena/agent-container my goal was that it would work transparently and the paths and user, etc. would be just the same as on the host but inside of a docker container.

  • johnsonjo

    today at 1:39 PM

    I've been using jai [1] for sandboxing on linux (although I use opencode and local models and not claude code) and I'm pretty satisfied with it. It comes in three different modes [2]: casual mode, strict mode, and bare mode. Here's some descriptions of each mode:

    Casual mode [3]: > Your home directory is mounted as a copy-on-write overlay. The jailed process sees your real files, but writes go to $HOME/.jai/default.changes instead of modifying originals, except in the directory where you ran jai. Your current working directory grants full read/write access to code in the jail (unless suppressed with -D). So files deleted there are really gone. /tmp and /var/tmp are private. The rest of the filesystem is read-only.

    Strict mode [4]: > The process runs as the unprivileged jai system user, not as you. Home directory is an empty private directory at $HOME/.jai/<name>.home. Granted directories (via -d or cwd) are exposed with id-mapped mounts — files look like they are owned by jai inside the jail. Because the process has a different UID, it cannot read files outside your home directory that are only accessible to your user — this is where confidentiality comes from.

    Bare mode [5]: > Home directory is an empty private directory, like strict mode. But the process runs as your user, not as jai. This means it cannot provide confidentiality — the process can still read any file accessible to your UID outside the home directory.

    I've always ran my stuff in casual so far just so my whole computer doesn't get rimraffed :P. but I'm thinking of switching to just strict mode, but haven't really vibe coded in a while so I haven't tried it yet.

    [1]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/

    [2]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html

    [3]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html#casual-mode

    [4]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html#strict-mode

    [5]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html#bare-mode

    • mkagenius

      today at 3:40 PM

      [dead]

  • _aavaa_

    today at 1:31 PM

    If you don’t trust the CLI version to be properly sandbox d, why would the desktop one be?

  • notsirius

    today at 1:33 PM

    does claude desktop actually solve this issue? I’m on mac and use docker sbx to solve this https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/get-started/

  • today at 1:35 PM

  • FergusArgyll

    today at 2:18 PM

    On Linux you have bubblewrap!

• raverbashing

  today at 1:40 PM

  Or, what does the Desktop app does that the webpage doesn't do?

I made a way to build Swift apps that build on Linux and run and look the same on MacOS https://github.com/Lore-Hex/QuillUI

I know Claude is electron now but if they made it native swift on macos then they could use this

Personally I don’t understand why Claude Code doesn’t have a mode to make text green and characters come down from the top of the screen individually, like in The Matrix.

• gaiagraphia

  today at 3:46 PM

  Massively bugs me. I have to wear green sunglasses, change the language to Japanese, and turn my monitor sideways to get any real work done nowadays.

YES! But also hmm, maybe not. I literally installed the unofficial build[0] a few hours ago, and when I started it and saw a bunch of Electron processes immediately trigger my spawn swarm detector, I just closed it. Don't think I'll ever touch it again.

[0] https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian

• aaddrick

  today at 1:45 PM

  Hey!

  That's me, and that sounds weird. Mind giving stone more details so I can help get to the source of it? Or just submit an issue on the repo. Should just be one main electron process.

  • aaddrick

    today at 1:45 PM

    Some more details*

Not exactly Claude Desktop but we have something more "generic" that works across multiple OSes (written in Tauri) - Msty Claw [1]. It also comes with a companion E2E encrypted mobile app.

[1]: https://msty.ai/claw/features

Anthropic, if you're reading this: I'm a developer trying to figure out LLMs, I use them 8h per day to do my work. Claude Desktop is a missing piece I don't have access to because I'm only on Linux! I'm happy with a simple AppImage.

Just one-shot vibe it for yourself.

Lame, I know, but you have to entertain yourself sometimes when the only thing anybody talks about here is ruddy spicy autocorrect and self-inflicted job destruction.

• witx

  today at 1:59 PM

  > self-inflicted job destruction

  Glad someone else sees this as well in this crappy website

Also can you please make it easy to switch between my work and personal accounts on mobile!

• steezeburger

  today at 2:07 PM

  Yeah that would be great. I seriously don't understand how a company with this much money doesn't have some of the more basic ux implemented to make it a really great app. Blows my mind.

How can they? They are busy designing agentic loops. They ship 8x more lines of code!!!

>> Anthropic, please ship an official malware for Linux

Here, fixed it for you.

Our app, Runner: Cowork++

Supports linux :)

https://runner.now/

I thought going into ipo they were selling the idea that claude is already build claude.

Cowork already boots Ubuntu 22.04 internally on macOS. The Linux execution path exists inside the product. What's missing is a published build.

Yes please! I think it's just kinda weird that this hasn't been done yet.

If you feel that strongly about it, why not write the issue description yourself?

• endorphine

  today at 6:08 PM

  Really.. I was scrolling to find a comment complaining for this slop GH issue, which should be 10% of the size of what it is.

  Surprised me it took so much scrolling to get to this.

  Like, who reads all that crap?

"Sources for the load-bearing claims"

I no longer know if this is a real person who is simping for Anthropic and will be ultimately enslaved by Anthropic or if this is an Anthropic ad to have "proof" for the high demand of their services.

• applfanboysbgon

  today at 4:59 PM

  Neither, it is just a random LLM-generated issue.

  • zombot

    today at 5:31 PM

    It it was an LLM, why didn't it just vibecode the desired software instead of generating ticket spam?

Doesn't Wayland make it impossible anyway?

• monooso

  today at 4:31 PM

  In what way?

  • trumpdong

    today at 4:54 PM

    In the way of eschewing all the APIs that allow an X11 client to control your desktop.

I love the dueling messages on AI

"It'll make software easy and replace all software jobs!"

"Sorry, a Linux client is too hard and too much work!"

We are all waiting for it.

"Linux" is not an operating system. One does not "just" release something "for Linux"

You're better off just using code cli

Why dont you ask Claude to write you a TUI ?

Why would they do that with their...checks notes...software changing AI?

• gaiagraphia

  today at 3:20 PM

  Anthropic one-shotting a Linux distro would be quite the ad...

  Perplexity are devleoping Comet as an AI-powered browser. I wonder if anybody will take the OS leap.

just use WINE or docker

• syllogistic

  today at 1:56 PM

  > Just use WINE

  Did you just tell me to go fuck myself ?

  • xdavidliu

    today at 2:06 PM

    pull requests are welcome

Please don't.

There is already way too much slop.

[flagged]

That will come the year after the year of linux on. The desktop /s