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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

#301

Post by jlokier »

eptcyka wrote: post #208
jlokier wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks to the Linux kernel's extremely high backward compatibility, and virtually all the libraries being open source, you can ship old or frozen versions of libraries with your application if you have to. You can defensively set shipped binaries as fallbacks in the event the application is running on a newer system that dropped critical functionality, while using the distro version if that's more up to date and stil…

You cannot ship features that depend on cgroups v1. You may not ship features that depend on netlink attributes that exist on some distros, not others.

Yes, there are a few exceptions to the Linux kernel's backward compatibility. I've encountered others, but I don't remember which any more. They are quite rare, though.

cgroups v1 might be the most irritating, because it was useful and something a shipped application or service might realistically use.

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

#302

Post by wqaatwt »

WD-42 wrote: post #230
sgt wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome: Is electron without electron Teams: Was electron Steam: Valve is deeply invested in Linux, this isn't them just shipping an app. Different category. Jetbrains: Java Cursor: Electron Discord: Electron Matlab: Java ABI compatibility doesn't matter for any of your examples.

> Different category

Isn’t Steam mostly webviews though ?

> Java

Well.. It’s not that massively different from running Qt apps in Gnome, though?

> ABI compatibility

I’m sure it matters for Swing to an large extent. Of course it the problem of the people developing the UI framework rather than the end app

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

#303

Post by rav3ndust »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #122
WD-42 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of us are happy gnome doesn’t support tray icons. We are sick of devs thinking their app is so important it needs a visual presence at all times. If I need your app I’ll bring it to the foreground, we have the technology. Global shortcuts definitely a pain point with Wayland but the portals are making progress.

How do I bring your app to the foreground if I can't see an icon anywhere? I just installed Ubuntu for the first time a few weeks ago and genuinely don't see how people are supposed to use it, coming from a Windows/Mac background. How does a Linux user know what's running, without going to a terminal and running top? The lack of desktop UI affordances in the leading "user-friendly" Linux distribution should be seen a…

if you're running ubuntu, and the app uses a systray icon, you just click on the systray icon. ubuntu has appindicators out of the box.

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

#304

Post by bigpeopleareold »

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…

I know you are being facetious that there are a few that are a little bit too persnickety with old ThinkPads, but if they used a known distribution on the said 13-year old ThinkPad (that would probably be in the T430 territory), would it be better? I have a T430s and that is still a fine computer, even if my primary one is an 8 year old ThinkPad.

Maybe those same people can just prefer using OpenCode. It's at least free software, particularly if that old computer is running only free software with free firmware, and OpenCode can run free models.

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

#305

Post by Normal_gaussian »

Kye wrote: post #268
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not karma gated?

It's been so long I have no idea what the karma thresholds are so this is possible.

I had a little search this morning, and I think I was wrong and you're right. 2h edit/delete when you have no replies.

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

#306

Post by MarsIronPI »

WD-42 wrote: post #108
aaddrick wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A lot of us are happy gnome doesn’t support tray icons. We are sick of devs thinking their app is so important it needs a visual presence at all times. If I need your app I’ll bring it to the foreground, we have the technology. Global shortcuts definitely a pain point with Wayland but the portals are making progress.

I still don't see what was so broken about X's security model that it warranted a whole new protocol (with its own problems that it's still solving 15 years later) instead of an extension to X11.

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

#307

Post by monooso »

make3 wrote: post #260
9dev wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really care about the OS. I want a beefy laptop with a good keyboard and trackpad, long battery life, and a crisp screen. Preferably very silent, bonus points for a clean design. That’s the value proposition of a MacBook.

I also care about my desktop supporting consumer electronics without having to waste an afternoon debugging Bluetooth drivers every two weeks

Thankfully, it has been many years since I had to debug Bluetooth drivers (or anything of that ilk) on Linux.

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

#308

Post by monooso »

prmoustache wrote: post #249

You got to love the irony of seeing hundred of users not being able to actually build a desktop version themselves using the cli agent. Are LLMs rendering people that useless?

Anthropic clamping down on non-first party clients using their subscription plans may also have something to do with it.
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