How can they? They are busy designing agentic loops. They ship 8x more lines of code!!!
Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux
81–90 of 331 posts
Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux
#82Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux
#83Hey! 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.
Still mess it up* Swipe keyboards on mobile are awful, but I can't break that habit.
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.
Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 wit…
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 w…
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?
Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux
#85Please don't.
There is already way too much slop.
Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does not. You just get more vocal angry customers who hate Flatpak and hate you for using it.
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…
> 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.
Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux
#87Hey! 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 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…
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.
Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
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?
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Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 wit…
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 w…
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Re: Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux
#90Hey! 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.
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.