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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

#181

Post by lucideer »

randusername wrote: post #177
lucideer wrote: post #72

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

I was under the impression electron is chosen less because of broad cross-platform concerns and more because chat apps, specifically, require a level of care in text rendering that nobody really wants to design from first principles when they can just piggy back on web technologies. But I wouldn't know first-hand.

Text rendering is:

1. generally done well by many different UI frameworks

2. generally done better by most popular native UI frameworks than what Electron provides

BUT - those UI frameworks are typically not (very) cross-platform. In that context, Electron provides one of the best unified text-rendering stories of cross-platform options. But definitely far from the best overall.

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

#183

Post by cmrdporcupine »

bloqs wrote: post #150

Why would I use this over browser version or CLI

As others have said, there's all sorts of things an HTML renderer can do better than terminal: proper (not hacked) image handling on both input and output, rendering graphical results, graphs, better code highlighting and diffs, interactive elements, etc. But one thing that strikes me as especially important: a proper accessibility story with magnification, screen reader, TTS etc.

All the stuff people are hacking into TUIs is honestly a bit silly, they're actually very inefficient for high fidelity UIs. Having worked in it and on it before while @ GOOG, the actual renderer in Chromium is an optimized thing of beauty. It really makes sense to leverage it. Appropriately.

But all of the above could (should) be done as a locally hosted web page via the existing codex CLI launching a local web server... rather than shipping an electron binary with its own entire fork of Chromium.

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

#184

Post by ac29 »

debazel wrote: post #173
takoid wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see your prompt(s) and how you managed to make it do this. I’ve been using Codex in full access mode constantly for the past couple months on a Pro plan and I haven’t had a single incident like this. I’ve used it across macOS, Linux, and Windows as well, so my usage isn’t limited to a specific setup either.

I never sent any prompts to it, it did all of this during the installation. Here is one related GitHub issue I found for it https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/12343 Looks like they don't intend to change this.

Your earlier post is misleading, since "it" sounds like the model, not the installer. (of course if the latter was created by the former, its basically the same complaint, but I suspect what you are talking about was a deliberate design decision by a human)

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

#185

Post by dingaling911 »

boutell wrote: post #161
dingaling911 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL! Though as someone who shipped commercial software on Linux, it wasn't that bad, you just had to ship everything other than the kernel.

LOL. Conveniently, electron is everything other than the kernel. Also, as much wasted RAM as an entire second instance of chrome that shares nothing, but oh well.

Yeah, but if you use Qt like I did, you're shipping libstdc++, some other crap and Qt.

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

#186

Post by timcobb »

dingaling911 wrote: post #185
boutell wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL. Conveniently, electron is everything other than the kernel. Also, as much wasted RAM as an entire second instance of chrome that shares nothing, but oh well.

Yeah, but if you use Qt like I did, you're shipping libstdc++, some other crap and Qt.

Yeah, I was kind of surprised recently that there's no solid native way to build desktop apps on Linux! I was thinking I'd build something actually native with AI but then the options were QT or or gtk...

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

#187

Post by ac29 »

fragmede wrote: post #32
cloudie78 wrote: post #25

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.

I haven't had bluetooth issues in years, but I did have an agent reverse engineer a smartphone app that was required for programming some BT headphones. Now I can push my desired runtime settings automatically to the headphones when they connect to my computer

So, yes, I would say agents are pretty good at working with Bluetooth on Linux

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

#190

Post by disiplus »

timcobb wrote: post #186
dingaling911 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but if you use Qt like I did, you're shipping libstdc++, some other crap and Qt.

Yeah, I was kind of surprised recently that there's no solid native way to build desktop apps on Linux! I was thinking I'd build something actually native with AI but then the options were QT or or gtk...

You don't care what were you trying to build but for a quick me alone Linux app I used Flutter. Honestly it's my go-to when I want to have a quick native app on any platform but dont want to bundle electron.
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