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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

#271

Post by shanewei »

SyneRyder wrote: post #9
shanewei wrote: 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 don't think the CLI offers daily routines under the Anthropic subscription anymore? There's also the cross conversation memory search, which uses a different conversation dataset (the Claude Web / Claude.AI conversations) than Claude Code does. I'm not even sure Claude Code does cross conversation search? The Desktop interface also presents Markdown as formatted text and presents artifacts (especially interactive o…

That makes sense. Maybe the existing VS Code integration is the place to solve part of this for coding workflows: formatted output, artifacts, and search UI all seem useful next to the editor. The Claude.ai conversation corpus/search seems like the part that may need deeper account integration.

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

#272

Post by asveikau »

Loeffelmann wrote: post #103
asveikau wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm, I hate flatpak

Why?

It's superfluous, goes against unix philosophy, solves problems that don't exist in the most obnoxious ways possible, and your distro packager is certainly better.

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

#273

Post by musictubes »

WD-42 wrote: post #226
lukan wrote: 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.

As someone whose last interaction with Windows was 98 and have been on Mac ever since I also had no idea what a super key was. Also Googled “Windows key” and realized I had seen it before in pictures but never thought about it.

I used some sort of *nix on a VAX terminal in college and ran SUSE on my machine once I realized I hated Windows 98 but all of that is ancient history at this point lol. All of that is to say that it is possible for someone to be peripherally interested in this topic and not be aware of what a super key would be even in context. Maybe someone that uses Windows could pick up on it earlier but I certainly didn’t:)

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

#274

Post by ryandrake »

the__alchemist wrote: post #189
Aurornis wrote: post #64

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…

I don't have experience with Electron, but... IMO if you compile on something like Ubuntu 20, many applications will work reliably on Ubuntu 20, 22, 24,+, and Debian 2020 editions +. (Assuming same CPU arch as the compiling computer). Obviously this will probably fail on other distros, but I've found in the past similar groupings. Backwards compatibility is different: I expect a package a compile on Ubuntu 24 not to…

Man, I remember 25 years ago writing commercial software that worked across a half a dozen Linux distributions, at least two BSDs, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Irix, and close to half a dozen CPU architectures. Yet today, developers struggle getting a build for two different versions of the same Linux distribution. The industry has lost a critical skill.

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

#276

Post by gerdesj »

Aurornis wrote: post #64
aaddrick wrote: post #26

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…

"So your engineers spend a half day installing that in a VM and debugging it, but the problem is in upstream somewhere."

So get to grips with "upstream"! Managing upset "opinionated" and "entitled" users is par for the course anywhere. Have a look at how Veeam do it, for example.

Obviously that sort of compatibility nonsense never happens in say Windows (fairly popular OS).

Let's take a quick look at say web proxies. Proxies are quite popular in corporate environments but blow me if Windows and vendors who use it make it as hard as possible to deal with:

You might think group policy would sort it all out - lol! You have loads of elderly policies relating to IE (several versions) hanging around smelling rather fishy and mildly useful if you have older Windows hanging around. You can use GPOs to fix the following but it will be Preferences and involve a bit of ingenuity.

You have .Net Framework apps - eg AD Sync (Entra, Smentra whatever its called today). That will need you to fiddle with a specific XML file.

winhttp api? Powershell. OK you have two sets of settings here: proxy and advproxy. proxy has string properties that you set and is a bit crap and advproxy has a JSON flavour and is a bit shit. advproxy seems to ignore anything in the ignore list apart from or exclusively . At least advproxy allows you to fall back on a proxy.pac file (which IE decided to call wpad.dat and who can forget an IE5 version that called it WPAD.DA?)

Picking on Linux users is disingenuous - all OSs can be customized to the point of tricky to support and besides who on earth is Twitter?

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

#277

Post by forsalebypwner »

himhckr wrote: post #80

Not exactly Claude Desktop but we have something more "generic" that works across multiple OSes (written in Tauri) - Msty Claw [1]. It also comes with a companion E2E encrypted mobile app. [1]: https://msty.ai/claw/features

Thanks, I use DeepSeek and Gemini mostly so I was looking for something that isn't tied to Anthropic. I'm mostly covered by pi.dev but want to try out a GUI to see if they're worth my time. This looks surprisingly feature-complete, too bad it's only "Free for personal use in beta", but I'll definitely give it a spin.

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

#278

Post by kdnvk »

mmcnl wrote: post #134
shepherdjerred wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you can create infinite software you still have to be very intentional about what you’re choosing to work on. There’s still a cost to testing, support, planning, etc even if coding is now “free”

Anthropic claims 8-fold productivity increase since 2025. If even that isn't enough to enable support for Linux, I don't know what it is.

They explicitly did not claim this in the blog post

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

#279

Post by winter_blue »

Aurornis wrote: post #64
aaddrick wrote: post #26

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…

Couldn't just a single Flatpak release be sufficient?

Flatpak can be set up on many/most distros.

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

#280

Post by DrFritz2 »

aaddrick wrote: post #26

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 used it from the beginning. It's 100% functional.
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