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Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux

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Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

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.

Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux

#53

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.

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.

Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux

#55

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.

I have been running Claude Desktop on Linux via the unofficial Debian build for months and it is solid. The unofficial repo at github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian works well for both Debian and RPM-based distros.

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.

Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux

#56
post #53

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.

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.

The stable Linux ABI is Win32 provided by Wine.

Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux

#59
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bug…

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).

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

Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux

#60

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.

> 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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