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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

#231

Post by cptskippy »

preg_match wrote: post #219
timcobb wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Qt is as solid as it gets. It's very, very high quality. Much higher quality than Microsoft's frameworks on Windows.

How would you know? It's impossible to have done a thorough analysis of all the Windows UI frameworks, five have been released since I started typing...

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

#232

Post by jerf »

lukan wrote: post #144
concinds wrote: post #77

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.

Browsers fundamentally chew on RAM for breakfast.

AIUI the reason is, "we", collectively even though we don't all work on them, optimize browsers for speed above almost all else. Then, when all the advertising websites on the internet consume all that speed, we can't go back and have to optimized for speed even harder. All that optimizing for speed ends up consuming lots of RAM, from all the images, the speed-optimize DOM with lots of cross-linking, the JIT and its generation of native code paths, the endless layers of caches, etc. etc. at every point where a browser can choose between RAM and speed it will choose speed unless it's just impossible to choose it for some reason.

So even if you write good code in Electron, it still tends to eat resources like candy.

On the plus side, if you write good code, you will pick up all those optimizations too, which is not necessarily all bad. Running something like VSCode at all is a powerful testament to the browser ecosystem now. IDEs do a lot of very heavy duty lifting and need a lot of performance to do all their work. But you can imagine that when the same text rendering system that enables all that fancy & fast syntax highlighting and all the other decorations and features in the editor window is used to display a preview of a markdown file that said preview is probably going to eat way more RAM than your instincts may have guessed.

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

#233

Post by 3abiton »

SyneRyder wrote: post #85
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 guess it's easier to solve Erdos problems and improve the lower bound of the Riemann hypothesis, than it is to solve Linux desktop app distribution.

Nonetheless, it's the year og the linux desktop!

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

#234

Post by manishsharan »

An often overlooked advantage of Electron based apps is they can convert any older version of laptop into a nice toaster oven.

This is fantastic as I can toast or reheat my frozen waffles on the same machine which is also running a agentic loop on codex desktop to cook my software.

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

#235

Post by cloudie78 »

pjmlp wrote: post #170
cloudie78 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-i…

I see you never worked in enterprise consulting with either laptops or cloud VMs managed by customer IT, and where elevated actions require either IT tickets, or elevation tools with description fields why the operation is required, with development done with specific team accounts.

Quite on the contrary, in fact.

Sectors involved in, in no particular order: government, financial, telecom, energy (gas and electric), manufacturing (large european conglomerates), healthcare, logistics

In fact I was the one usually helping IT Teams put the torture devices and policies you’re subjected to in place lol.

Banks would usually give us laptops with smart card readers and only allowed access to their VPN from a limited set of public IP addresses.

Govt was a bit more lax, but same principles applied, was really fun doing any kind of work over a laggy VNC.

My favourite one was probably where you’d have to hop from one Azure cloud VM, to Citrix to a bastion windows box, off of which you’d RDP to the actual work VM only to putty to the actual damn Linux box you cared about.

Energy sector was more lax, they let us set up a GitLab instance and a small CICD setup to which we’d push the code developed on our local boxes.

Oh and the ones I mentioned - they usually ask us what tools we wanted on our boxes as well.

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

#237

Post by Muromec »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #94
fragmede wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> How do I get it to fix my Bluetooth if I do that? Manual tool calls. I ask AI to give me all the necessary reconnaissance commands, then I run them myself on the host and paste the output on the terminal with the SSH connection into the guest virtual machine where the harness is running. The AI then either figures it out and gives me the answer or runs additional tool calls by me. Repeat until annoying task is done…

Or just give it shell and it dies it all by itself

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

#238

Post by cloudie78 »

HumblyTossed wrote: post #164
cloudie78 wrote: post #121

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.

> You always have a choice to use/learn/make a different tool. Weak argument. People don't have infinite time. People just want tools they trust and that aren't enshitified.

Trust and VSCode don’t go together in the same sentence lol

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

#239

Post by cloudie78 »

p-e-w wrote: post #129
cloudie78 wrote: post #121

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.

Many official, high-quality language support plugins are only available for VSCode. For some languages, you have a “choice” to use another IDE in the same sense that you have a choice to do programming with a hex editor. Lean being an example, where every alternative is in its infancy.

It’s called LSP, any good editor supports it.

In fact, VSCode’s support for Lean is via LSP anyways.

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

#240

Post by shevy-java »

water-drummer wrote: post #8
wltr wrote: post #4

If that’s an Electron app, what’s the difference with running it in the browser?

Why do you need nodejs if you can run javascript in the browser?

I can't answer that question, but I think you can do more with node than with default javascript, such as access to local files. This is something I wanted javascript to do for local use and people always said "you may not do this, your computer will be destroyed". So I just use ruby instead and am still annoyed that javascript is so crippled by default at all times.
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