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aaddricktoday at 1:55 PM10 repliesview on HN

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.


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Aurornistoday 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.

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WD-42today 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.

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_fat_santatoday 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.

aaddricktoday at 1:56 PM

Still mess it up*

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

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Levitatingtoday at 5:47 PM

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

flatpak!

seabrookmxtoday 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.

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roryrjbtoday at 1:59 PM

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

orhmeh09today at 4:37 PM

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

jkwangtoday at 2:48 PM

[flagged]

sgttoday 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.

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