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#linux#claude#desktop#don#https#app#support#more#build#electron
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Discussion (302 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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.
Global shortcuts definitely a pain point with Wayland but the portals are making progress.
You have taken on the work the distributions do in the open source world. No upstream open source developer takes that on. Instead of getting bug reports from users, upstream developers insist bug reports are filtered by the distro maintainer first. They fix problems on their side so you never see them, and the ones that do make it through have been triaged. It's a win for everyone.
So the solution is to handle it the way they do. Choose a couple of baselines: maybe Debian Stable and Fedora. Publish packages for them, and make it plain they are only certified for those platforms. Make the rest someone else's problem: if you want it working on distro X, you package it for distro X. You've done the bulk of the work for them anyway, as most of them are either Debian or RPM based.
The key words here are "open source", right? Some problems can't be solved without cooperation with the developer.
Honestly, it sounds like you guys need to learn to say no. Worked at an OEM and we had device divers for RHEL. If you got it working on something else, good for you. But if you wanted to open a support case, you better be able to reproduce the bug on a supported version of RHEL.
I would occasionally humor people running CentOS if I had some spare cycles, but if you were on Debian the answer was: sorry, would love to help but I can’t.
The people who can’t understand why you have a tight support matrix are the people you don’t want to get sucked into the rabbit hole with anyway.
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.
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.)
Much easier to create a vm testing swarm of 100 disitributions with llms
I dunno why this is always so difficult.
My reply to the comment below outlines the shape of the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436#48435801
But it has proven quite the challenge to support old Linux distros. We have tried using nix to pin deps, but this easily leads to new issues: hardcoded RPATHs leaking into binaries, glibc compatibility issues, etc.
If we instead fork the build environment and use an old Ubuntu for building our Linux app, then my life gets harder, because now I have two targets for a whole lot of internal tooling that my team maintains, and that tooling needs to be deployed to both build environments. Again, its the same shit: glibc mismatches, missing/different shared libraries, etc. Just causing problems in a different place.
There is certainly some element of skill issue at play. But I wouldn't call it easy.
Maybe those same people can just prefer using OpenCode. It's at least free software, particularly if that old computer is running only free software with free firmware, and OpenCode can run free models.
Obviously this will probably fail on other distros, but I've found in the past similar groupings. Backwards compatibility is different: I expect a package a compile on Ubuntu 24 not to work on Ubuntu 22.
This is anecdotal, and in the context of rust + EGUI, so I'm not sure how applicable it is to Electron.
I recently hit a Wayland snag: It doesn't support Device Events other than mouse movement. I worked around it by changing to Window events. I could see that being annoying if this substitution weren't acceptable, but it was in this case.
"Tony Stark can do it in a cave! With rocks!"
:)
Flatpak can be set up on many/most distros.
- titlebar
- tray icon w/light and dark mode support
- global keyboard shortcut
- redraw events after resizing
Those are a subset of the many items that don't play well between various distros.
Like Ubuntu Gnome w/X11 vs Pop!OS COSMIC w/Wayland or any of the tiling window managers like hyprland.
So get to grips with "upstream"! Managing upset "opinionated" and "entitled" users is par for the course anywhere. Have a look at how Veeam do it, for example.
Obviously that sort of compatibility nonsense never happens in say Windows (fairly popular OS).
Let's take a quick look at say web proxies. Proxies are quite popular in corporate environments but blow me if Windows and vendors who use it make it as hard as possible to deal with:
You might think group policy would sort it all out - lol! You have loads of elderly policies relating to IE (several versions) hanging around smelling rather fishy and mildly useful if you have older Windows hanging around. You can use GPOs to fix the following but it will be Preferences and involve a bit of ingenuity.
You have .Net Framework apps - eg AD Sync (Entra, Smentra whatever its called today). That will need you to fiddle with a specific XML file.
winhttp api? Powershell. OK you have two sets of settings here: proxy and advproxy. proxy has string properties that you set and is a bit crap and advproxy has a JSON flavour and is a bit shit. advproxy seems to ignore anything in the ignore list apart from or exclusively <local>. At least advproxy allows you to fall back on a proxy.pac file (which IE decided to call wpad.dat and who can forget an IE5 version that called it WPAD.DA?)
Picking on Linux users is disingenuous - all OSs can be customized to the point of tricky to support and besides who on earth is Twitter?
It’s not a great experience if only some apps on supported on your favourite Linux distro while others aren’t.
Made comment about flatpack below the comment above.
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.
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.
Have you considered that maybe their code is just bad?
DaVinci resolve is QT. But making a video editor performant in Electron is even harder than writing it in C++..
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.
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
Swipe keyboards on mobile are awful, but I can't break that habit.
We haven’t.
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)
I’m pretty sure that excludes Claude Desktop.
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317463/20260531/flathub-a...
Unfortunately they do, instead of implementing a proper native application (don't hire web developers to do native apps).
Look at e.g. Cisco Webex, or Telegram. You can make a proper native application that just works and is not electron. A lot of people don't like electron apps, and it is more important in current economy (memory prices are too high to invest in more RAM).
Apparently Linus Torvalds liked AppImage too.
https://archive.ph/PSqlB
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."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436#48435801
flatpak!
That said, an official build would make a huge difference for enterprise adoption. Many companies have policies against unofficial packages, and the signing + update mechanism is always going to be more trustworthy when it comes from Anthropic directly.
For anyone waiting: the unofficial build is perfectly usable for personal projects. But I would love to see Anthropic prioritize this -- the Linux developer community is exactly the audience that pushes Claude the hardest.
Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but most of your posts are getting classified that way.
You obviously have good points to make and are welcome here! but if you'd please write text by hand which you plan to post to HN itself, we'd appreciate it. The community feels strongly about this right now.
a) be welcoming and indicate that we're OK with broken English (content and intent typically do get through), and/or
b) allow posting in languages other than English (does this even work right now?).
Above probably ahead of its time, but thought I'd just make the suggestion.
I'll be happy the day there's an official distribution and I can put the repo to rest
There’s still a cost to testing, support, planning, etc even if coding is now “free”
They can work on feature X or feature Y -- which is the better choice?
Apparently they don't think Linux support is significant. I doubt the lack of support is due to technical constraints.
AI doesn't solve this. You need humans who can understand and verify what is being made.
But I am still waiting. If everything was as the hype folks said it was, we would all be fucked already.
1) Develop software for linux
2) Provide decent support
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.
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.
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).
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?
They all have pros and cons. Pick the one that suits you best. Then you're also agent harness flexible (I use opencode).
[1]: https://nono.sh/os-sandbox
Sandboxing a GUI is typically more operational overhead than sandboxing a cli (mounting compositor sockets, GPU access, etc).
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I cannot stand this and do not know how to start a new project/session in a new folder. Even if I select a new folder in the UI when typing the first prompt of a new session, it keeps going back to the first folder I created. For this reason alone I am thinking of going to the CLI. But if anyone has any answers, I am all ears.
Other than that, I am happy with the CLI.
> Are you a Linux user? If so, are you sick of that lovely modal we made to tell you that there’s an update you need to go manually install? IF SO, boy do I have good news for you. We’ve ported our Rust-based updater to Linux, allowing Linux to update itself just like on Windows. Additionally, we now support .rpm and .pkg.tar.zst package formats for installation.
They have more challenging clients: have to deal with screencapture, audio capture, audio routing, meanwhile supporting 3 different package repositories. You just have to accept that you should be updating your build/runtime dependencies with each version as long as they fix your underlying problems. Having a single binary that you release and works, implies that you are shipping every library your binary depends on. Windows takes care of that with winsxs, Linux asks you to do it yourself.
Which desktop? Which destop version? Which libc? Which versions of the gazillion of other libs it depends on?
I can take a Total Commander version from a time when it was called "Windows Commander", compiled for Win95, and it would still run in latest updated Win11. Try that with a linux program!
(BTW, for Total Commander it works the other way too: latest Tcmd still runs in Win95.)
> Publish an official Claude Desktop build for Linux, targeting the two current Ubuntu LTS releases (and Debian) as a signed .deb via an Anthropic-operated apt repository, using the same distribution pipeline Claude Code already uses for Linux.
Also Flatpak or AppImage would make this accessible to every other distro. Alternatively you could run the deb with a Podman Toolbox.
Your point about backwards compatibility with Windows goes both ways, I have old games that I can _only_ run on Linux as they don't work on modern versions of Windows.
Like... You already use Docker and deploy to K8S... On Linux...
I’m open for suggestions though
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.
It’s really not that hard.
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.
Glad someone else sees this as well in this crappy website
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.
https://www.xrdp.org/
(Or x forwarding over ssh, or waypipie if you only need to access a gui application, not a desktop).
Are LLMs rendering people that useless?
[0] https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian
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.
[1]: https://msty.ai/claw/features
"It'll make software easy and replace all software jobs!"
"Sorry, a Linux client is too hard and too much work!"
The Linux desktop is fragmented and gatekept in such a manner that most people of a reasonable mind aren't going to waste tokens on it, and damned sure not going to waste software/support engineer time on it.
Note that none of these complaints are about CLI or server software. "Linux" the kernel + GNU utils + shell handle all of this just fine. The year of the Linux desktop is just never going to happen unless one desktop standard takes over and 'wins' in the short to medium term.
Now, in the longer term when tokens run cheap maybe we'll successfully have 20 different competing, incompatible Linux deskstops, but it doesn't seem likely.
Until that point expect Linux desktop to be a third class citizen.
(Some for different aspects of full stack features, some for managing specific client situations advised by the codebase and its tools!)
The CLI is not designed to be lightweight, and it’s easy to get into situations where every CLI session consumes multiple GB of memory alone - stack them up and it’s a lot!
And not all terminal GUIs handle multiple tabs well enough to see all sessions at a glance.
So on top of the plugin features, desktop is a really useful thing to have!
I imagine this is part of the impetus behind the Bun acquisition - they have a deep need to push optimization efforts towards the specific patterns that are most relevant to their use cases. (Which are probably good ones for the broader Bun userbase, to be sure, but relative prioritization is something they now have greater control over.)
I know Claude is electron now but if they made it native swift on macos then they could use this
You build it for Ubuntu , people will demand fedora. Build fedora they’ll want Arch.
This is fine for FOSS projects where the community can fork and contribute, but as a company I can imagine tons of support tickets coming from Linux users who’s particularly DE/Distro permutation isn’t working right.
Still. An App Image would be nice
And even if it were a valid point, why would eye even waste a second of your life argumenting against Linux when it's being asked to a company with a projected 1 trillion dollars IPO.
What's your stake here?
However, I do think an app image or I guess a flatpak would be nice.
We give Claude full visibility into your Linux machine, with a JS runtime over the top for building tools.
Here, fixed it for you.
Supports linux :)
https://runner.now/
Surprised me it took so much scrolling to get to this.
Like, who reads all that crap?
Perplexity are devleoping Comet as an AI-powered browser. I wonder if anybody will take the OS leap.
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.
Did you just tell me to go fuck myself ?
This won't work for all Linux users, but that doesn't have to be the bar. Making a few linux builds for the most popular distros is incrementally better than saying it's Windows/Mac only.
There is already way too much slop.