I guess it's easier to solve Erdos problems and improve the lower bound of the Riemann hypothesis, than it is to solve Linux desktop app distribution.

> App was released in February & took 6 entire months to port to Linux

Product releases at large companies are slowed dow by coordination and resources more than actual development. (I'm an Electron maintainer who is currently working on better Linux support in the framework, and also a developer/PM for a commercial app that supports Linux.)

It's very likely that the Codex Electron app already "worked" on Linux back in February, as in someone internally could build and run it from source and start a chat session. That fact would have made it possible for a small team to make a business case and start getting support from ops, QA, CS, marketing, legal, etc. The engineers would spend their unlimited tokens on Linux-specific build, packaging, and platform integrations (remember this is a computer use agent) to take the app from a prototype to something a company could actually launch and support for millions of users.

Apps are also a moving target. The entire time building up to release, the Linux desktop app would have been getting feature and design updates for free from the updates going out on Mac/Windows/web. None of those other teams working on those features have have had the time (or the mandate) to coordinate with Linux engineers if they were building a separate app from scratch, and I suspect such a proposal would never have gotten off the ground.

Exactly my thoughts! I was expecting a Rust app written from scratch available at least in Qt and GTK flavors , and maybe with a third and a fourth option.

Don't they have agent swarms with infinite tokens?

I was under the impression electron is chosen less because of broad cross-platform concerns and more because chat apps, specifically, require a level of care in text rendering that nobody really wants to design from first principles when they can just piggy back on web technologies.

But I wouldn't know first-hand.

Wonder how many will bother using the desktop version on linux. Im on macos and i just use the CLI most of the time

well this just shows how good the AI is at programming

The most remarkable thing is that it was built at all. What self-respecting Linux desktop user wouldn’t be satisfied with the TUI?

It is a marketing expense. We are talking about it. Surely the token cost was worthwhile on that basis alone. Students will likely get some usage out of it, too. But paying a human to do this port would have been an insane thing to do two years ago. I’d be surprised if they have more than 1000 MAUs for this client by the end of the year.

How are you doing testing for desktop apps? any tool recommendation?

Corporate it is a scam pretending to be a job creation program to make sure people dont get funny ideas

i doubt the UI was the hard part. these desktop apps are about computer use. thats where the tricky bits are.

6 months is way too long IMHO