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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

#211
post #136
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of software running on Linux that is not open source, though.

Such as? The only proprietary software I have running on my machine is electron apps, which are essentially bloated VMs. As we’ve seen from this thread, this is still apparently too great of an engineering feat for anthropic to tackle. I don’t think I’m unique in this regard.

Tons and yeah of course some are also Electron apps but not all... Proprietary apps I can think of include Chrome, Teams until a few years ago (I think they just gave up), Steam, the JetBrains IDE's, Cursor, Discord, Matlab, ...

Of course a lot of Linux users these days just live their lives through browsers. That's pretty sad.

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

#212
post #179

I find Claude Desktop on macOS infinitely better at managing RAM when you have 10+ or more parallel sessions. (Some for different aspects of full stack features, some for managing specific client situations advised by the codebase and its tools!) The CLI is not designed to be lightweight, and it’s easy to get into situations where every CLI session consumes multiple GB of memory alone - stack them up and it’s a lot!…

What exactly is taking up so much space? Why does it need anything more than whatever the context is? Isn't it just sending text over an API?

So yes, it's a TUI... but it's a TUI rendered by Ink, a React library, with a full JS runtime in the background. The number of re-renders per unit time involved with rerendering a JS implementation of flexbox every new token comes in? That's not a walk in the park for a garbage collector, and a single memory/retention leak can cascade dramatically.

I imagine this is part of the impetus behind the Bun acquisition - they have a deep need to push optimization efforts towards the specific patterns that are most relevant to their use cases. (Which are probably good ones for the broader Bun userbase, to be sure, but relative prioritization is something they now have greater control over.)

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

#213

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 guess compatibility hell is why Linux will never go mainstream. Users like their favourite apps just working on their favourite OS.

It’s not a great experience if only some apps on supported on your favourite Linux distro while others aren’t.

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

#215
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Oh please. The super key is the windows key. You come across as someone who has never used a computer before.

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?

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

#216

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.

[deleted]

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

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only Anthropic had some kind of automated testing, support, planning machine.

You wouldn't run an engineering company with 500 engineers reporting directly to the CEO. AI doesn't solve this. You need humans who can understand and verify what is being made.

Not, according to their AI influencers

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

#219

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…

Yeah. I just dropped another repackaging repo for Wispr Flow. https://github.com/wispr-flow-linux/wispr-flow-linux A lot of that is keyboard shortcuts for push-to-talk. Easy right? X11 is mostly fine, but the world is moving into Wayland. Wayland doesn't have shortcuts native and relies on xdg-desktop-portal, which in turn relies on each backend to implement it's own version. COSMIC from the Pop!OS team's xdg-desktop…

[deleted]

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

#220

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…

Yep, I've seen the same issue in video games. A few passionate engineers convince PMs to make a Linux version of the game, they test on few popular distros, everything is great. Then the game launches , and a very very very small minority of Linux users can't run your game, but they file 75% of all your support tickets. If you don't respond to them in the manner they find acceptable, they are extremely vocal on socia…

The sad part is, that those people usually think, they help linux this way.
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