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Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview

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Re: Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview

#151
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They replaced a pretty decent native Swift Mac app (with only some chronic state management bugs), weighing ~100MB ish, with the Codex app that most people don't need, made in Electron, which takes minimum 5GB+ including filesystem cruft. Today I ran into a memory leak that froze the app and made the Renderer process take 5GB, then 10GB of RAM. That was after I asked it to only touch 3 text files in its working direc…

"Thank god for the web platform and web apps." They can be amazing. But you can write shitty code in them like anywhere else.

But they're strictly sandboxed and won't muck up my local filesystem.

Re: Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview

#152

The most remarkable things about this announcement: - Electron based app: Electron is a framework sold on the basis of enabling rapid cross-platform development at the cost of performance. - Frontier AI company: AI is sold on the basis of enabling rapid development - App was released in February & took 6 entire months to port to Linux

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 am thinking about this too. I mean they have access to the highest level models and still they just produced a garbage.

Re: Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview

#153
post #90

Reminder to everyone, treat these as trojans. Run them isolated from the rest of your system. Give it a full desktop in a VM if you want to, just not direct access to your system.

And that's not a joke, I made the mistake of installing this on my Windows machine just to test it out quickly last week. It created 2 new users and then assigned new NTFS permissions for every single file under my user directory to them. This of course wrecked havoc, ssh refused to work, several applications refusing to start and a ton of permission errors. It did this without even a warning in the background and it…

Freaking wow.

Re: Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview

#154

The most remarkable things about this announcement: - Electron based app: Electron is a framework sold on the basis of enabling rapid cross-platform development at the cost of performance. - Frontier AI company: AI is sold on the basis of enabling rapid development - App was released in February & took 6 entire months to port to Linux

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

Re: Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview

#156
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You always have a choice to use/learn/make a different tool. It’s a prison of your own making. I’ve personally adopted a process where I structure my projects to ALWAYS keep credentials and sensitive information in a separate directory. The working copy gets rsynced to and from a dedicated VM with whatever $HARNESS.

If I have to deliver in technology X, customer isn't going to be happy getting Y instead, and I am not making my life miserable to work with editors lacking the specific tools, or that are forbidden by customer IT to be installed on provided equipment.

If your hypothetical client as security measure ONLY permits VSCode on a dedicated box you’re obligated to work on and have no control over - then I pray for you.

And for your hypothetical client.

Especially as judging by your description they despite this allow any VSCode plugin to be installed alongside it.

> and I am not making my life miserable to work with editors lacking the specific tools

And that’s the self-imposed prison I was talking about, there’s always alternative tools. In my mind a specific tool is something like Ghidra.

Re: Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview

#157

Reminder to everyone, treat these as trojans. Run them isolated from the rest of your system. Give it a full desktop in a VM if you want to, just not direct access to your system.

How do I get it to fix my Bluetooth if I do that? If you've been AI-pilled, 2026 is the year of Linux desktop because instead of dicking around with config files, I can just tell AI to fix python.

Recently I had some crashes on my system and claude correctly diagnosed it to a broken SATA cable on my hard drive. That was really practical

Re: Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview

#158
post #150

Why would I use this over browser version or CLI

I prefer the CLI myself, but I could imagine:

- nicer diff rendering, and directly mentioning parts of a diff

- Latex rendering (pretty annoying in the CLI, you have to actively tell Codex it's running in a terminal and replace Latex syntax with UTF-8 glyphs)

Re: Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview

#160

I'd love to see the stats on how many Linux users want this. Most Linux usage probably comes from WSL/SSH'ing into servers, where they would use the CLI instead of a GUI. Even for the people who run Linux on the desktop, most probably prefer the terminal anyways

It'd be nice for sending prompts from phone, although it is a whole lot of bloat for just that feature. Par for the course for the AI era, in order to do a thing first you must import the universe.
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