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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

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Could you not be extremely clear and state which distros are supported and make it clear that it may work on others but that they are untested

Unity Game Engine does this, They support x distro only. So you mess around installing their chosen OS only to find stuff still doesn't work properly.

:)

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

#232
post #226
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that this key is called "superkey" is a widespread standard on computers? Or just linux? I think the latter. And it might surprise you, but there are computers with no linux installed. I think the vast majority actually. So why the need for insults?

Pretending like the person I'm responding to isn't being willfully ignorant isn't helping. It's pretty simple to guess what "super key" means just from context, if not, it's a very quick (in the op's case) llm query away. Let's be real here.

I am real. I used computers for a long time. Also linux, but not exclusivly.

Guess what, I also only learned recently (some years now I think) after making it mire default, that on linux the windows key is called super key. And the person you insulted clarified he did not use linux at all.

So, how should he have known, despite working with computer extensivly?

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

#233

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 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…

Sounds like a product management problem. If you declare that you support RHEL and Ubuntu LTS and LTS-1 yet still process bug reports from other installations, the product owner is not doing their job properly. Any bug reports from Nix or Fedora got to be closed due to a wrong operating environment. Even accepting bug reports from the latest non-LTS Ubuntu release should be avoided.

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

#235

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.

Wouldn't Flatpak be a solution to many of those problems? Develop the app against one Window Manager / Desktop environment and have them as requirements of the Flatpak?

Flathub has banned any software developed using AI or which is «ethically questionable».

I’m pretty sure that excludes Claude Desktop.

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317463/20260531/flathub-a...

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

#236

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 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…

I understand this story, and I have heard it many, many times - but I do not understand how something that is possible for thousands of hobbyists writing text editors on their weekends is not possible for professionals! "You can't buy Linux-compatible software because it is too difficult to write. Instead, get it for free."

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

#237
post #3

What do you miss from the Desktop app that the CLI doesn’t cover? I’m mostly on Linux too and have just been using the CLI, so I’m curious.

I would like to see the inline images that Claude suddenly tries to show me, until I remind them that I can't see images in the CLI.

Other than that, I am happy with the CLI.

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

#239

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 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…

> Can confirm. At a past company we worked hard to release a Linux desktop client for our customers who wanted it ... you’re getting peppered with complaints from people using distributions you’ve never heard of ... but the problem is in upstream somewhere

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.

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

#240
post #225

This is like begging Microsoft to port SQL Server to Linux. Anthropic is a proprietary walled garden with poor service trading solely on dominance in a single product field, just like Microsoft with its business tools. Yet people are clamoring to become more dependent on them. Those same complaints you hear from Windows users today? Will be the complaints from Claude users in the future. No choice but to put up with…

SQL Server does have a Linux version though lol

The ARM64 Linux version (Azure version actually) is what I run on my MacBook through docker when I need it for testing.
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