Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux (github.com)

257 points by predkambrij 5 hours ago

neilv 7 minutes ago

OK, just please be careful how you frame what you're asking for.

For software development use of Claude, I'd be happy if the `claude` CLI executable does everything I need, within the Linux KVM VM sandboxes I create for the work, without a desktop client. The cleaner and more trustworthy, the better.

Also, for random interactive use of Claude for asking questions, I use it from my host desktop, sandboxed within the Web browser, and I want that to be well-supported. Someone marketing/product person at an AI company will naturally want to dark-pattern push people towards a proprietary desktop client, but that's one corner of abuse potential that we can still keep in check.

For agentic automation of my host desktop things and the things they have access to... no, thank you, the state of the art is not ready for that.

fragmede 5 minutes ago

The terribleness of VNC (vs RDP) is what gets you. A GUI client in that VM sucks to access. If it didn't, a GUI client wouldn't be easily rejectable.

aaddrick 4 hours ago

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.

Aurornis 2 hours ago

> 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 releases and everything will be good, but then you’re getting peppered with complaints from people using distributions you’ve never heard of because some part of the app isn’t working right. So your engineers spend a half day installing that in a VM and debugging it, but the problem is in upstream somewhere. The number of tickets with Linux issues keeps growing and each one is taking more time to debug, all for a number of customers that is so small you can’t justify doing it.

But those customers are angry. And vocal. They’re posting all over Twitter, Hacker News, and Reddit about how your company’s software is garbage, without mentioning that they’re running an unknown distribution on a 13 year old ThinkPad.

This even impacts open source projects. Several popular OSS Electron apps don’t work on many popular distros unless you set some command line workarounds, and even then it’s flakey. The open source projects get a pass because it’s open source, but if your company releases something you might be picking up a lot of angry, vocal customers that you didn’t want.

aaddrick 2 hours ago

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-cosmic doesn't support GlobalShortcuts yet (might now, haven't checked in a bit). So XWayland for them.

Tray icons? GNOME doesn't have a tray out of the box, but there's an extension. There's no standard for whether it's light mode or dark mode across distros and when you map out the options, no api's indicate whether the tray is light or dark while in light/dark mode. At some point you have to just accept it's not always perfect or patch in an override.

WD-42 an hour ago

trumpdong an hour ago

Reminds me that I occasionally have to set _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 because it's not always inherited from my login shell. Otherwise Java windows won't display anything because I suppose Java waits for them to be reparented.

jareklupinski 2 hours ago

> they’re running an unknown distribution on a 13 year old ThinkPad.

"Tony Stark can do it in a cave! With rocks!"

nbardy 2 hours ago

This does feel like the perfect setup for Claude though.

Much easier to create a vm testing swarm of 100 disitributions with llms

WD-42 an hour ago

Did you hire a Linux release engineer? Or was the situation the typical team of devs maining macOS that have never heard the term “Wayland” before plus That One Guy who switched to Ubuntu last year and advocated for it?

There are companies that do this right. But it often requires a hire. Too many companies think they can just yolo it because Linux isn’t a serious OS or whatever and then are surprised when it doesn’t work out well.

jlokier 20 minutes ago

eptcyka an hour ago

hparadiz 2 hours ago

You compile for the lowest possible Linux kernel and bundle your libs. Don't use container formats for stuff like this. tar.gz with an installer script is king.

I dunno why this is always so difficult.

aaddrick an hour ago

seabrookmx 2 hours ago

Flatpak mostly solves this for GUI apps.

Aurornis 2 hours ago

aaddrick 40 minutes ago

WD-42 3 hours ago

> The main reason must companies don't publish Linux electron apps

But they do? Companies don’t publish anything BUT electron apps. If desktop Linux gets anything from outside of FOSS, it’s electron. See Spotify, discord, slack, vscode… list goes on. I don’t think a for profit company has provided a GTK or qt app for Linux in the last 20 years.

I applaud your efforts but this is a supposed trillion dollar company with a product that probably has thousands of electron apps in its training set. They should be paying you.

Aurornis 2 hours ago

Electron apps don’t work well across all of the Linux distributions if you’re doing anything that isn’t very simple.

The comment was that the Electron apps aren’t being released for Linux even when they exist because Linux is so much harder to support, even in Electron.

If they don’t have resources (or desire) to keep the Electron app working on all the Linux distros then they definitely won’t have the resources to write a completely separate GTK app for the few Linux users.

WD-42 2 hours ago

_fat_santa an hour ago

There's a similar project for Codex Desktop: https://github.com/ilysenko/codex-desktop-linux.

After going through this process to get codex installed on Linux I'm honestly baffled why OpenAI doesn't have an official port. Though I haven't tested every part of the app, everything works as intended, even got computer use working without any issues.

aaddrick 4 hours ago

Still mess it up*

Swipe keyboards on mobile are awful, but I can't break that habit.

tasuki 3 hours ago

We have basically achieved AGI, but typing on mobile is still an unsolved problem. GBoard's dictionaries for Czech and Polish are still missing many usual declensions...

Normal_gaussian 2 hours ago

The old minuum keyboard was fantastic; now I'm forced to use a swipe keyboard I'm constantly making mistakes - but at least its faster than pecking.

Kye 4 hours ago

For future reference: you can edit posts for up to 2 hours.

Normal_gaussian 2 hours ago

freedomben 4 hours ago

Nice, you have RPMs and DEBs in a remote repo we can add! Thanks for making it so easy to use :-)

Also, I can't break the swipe keyboard habit either. It's the worst, but still better than the alternatives. Someday I hope physical keyboard makes a return (but I"m not holding my breath)

aaddrick an hour ago

roryrjb 4 hours ago

If OpenCode can do it, then Anthropic can do it.

seabrookmx 2 hours ago

Have you considered flatpak support? I know it's has its rough edges, but I use many apps across arch/Fedora/Ubuntu that are delivered as a single flatpak.

aaddrick an hour ago

I've looked on the rare occasion, but no one is asking for it on the repo, so hadn't been a priority like other distribution channels.

It's great that I can ship one item for all platforms, but Flatpack doesn't solve the compatibility discovery problem for me.

More context in my reply to the comment linked here :https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436#48435661

orhmeh09 an hour ago

Sounds like a job for a more capable LLM than Opus.

sgt 3 hours ago

Biggest problem with Linux apps - i.e. distributed with ease the way that Windows and macOS apps are distributed, is the lack of a stable ABI. If you asked me about this 20 years ago I'd say in 2026 there'd for sure be a stable ABI, but no.

seabrookmx 2 hours ago

Everyone parrots this but I don't think it's true. The Linux kernel does famously have a stable ABI (we "don't break user space" after all).

The issue is folks expect this to be at a higher level, so when libc or GTK or Qt etc. have breaking changes, all your apps using the old versions fail. This is a legitimate pain point with traditional distros.. I don't want to sound like I'm downplaying it.

However, this is basically solved by flatpak (and others like it, eg snap) which contain _all_ these dependencies in the package. Layering (ala containers) is used for deduplication so you don't have 20 copies of a given GTK version.

While MacOS provides the windowing toolkit etc. at the OS level, it's otherwise similar to how a .app file works. Installers aren't dropping dynamic libraries and resource files all over your disk, the app is "self-contained."

aaddrick an hour ago

WD-42 2 hours ago

This isn’t an issue in practice because the software running on Linux is open source. Yes if you want to distribute proprietary binary blobs and have them work forever it’s going to be a challenge, but in that case better to stick with the binary blob operating system.

sgt 30 minutes ago

est31 3 hours ago

The stable Linux ABI is Win32 provided by Wine.

Retr0id 4 hours ago

If only Anthropic had some kind of automated tool that was good at porting software

shepherdjerred an hour ago

Even if you can create infinite software you still have to be very intentional about what you’re choosing to work on.

There’s still a cost to testing, support, planning, etc even if coding is now “free”

mmcnl 7 minutes ago

Anthropic claims 8-fold productivity increase since 2025. If even that isn't enough to enable support for Linux, I don't know what it is.

trumpdong an hour ago

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

scrollop 23 minutes ago

Imagine if cutting edge AI companies could decide to using their world best AI to

1) Develop software for linux

2) Provide decent support

zombot a minute ago

If there were any truth to the marketing stories that say they have such a thing, then they could indeed.

ameliaquining 4 hours ago

It doesn't sound like that's the bottleneck.

cookiengineer 3 hours ago

You forgot the *allegedly in there.

Lionga 4 hours ago

Use the existing Slop they have that needs 1GB of Ram for a simple Terminal app to create an even more slopped Linux app... If only they had any devs at their 500K and way up pay package that could actually write a simple app, that you know does not suck.

lioeters 2 hours ago

Those highly paid human devs are hard at work on the Torment Nexus, which is their priority of course, you don't want China to win do you?

robby_w_g an hour ago

delduca 4 hours ago

You’re asking too much.

smrtinsert 3 hours ago

Sorry that's not the use case anymore its about (checks notes) "forward deployed engineers", yep that's it. Go build!

shanewei 4 hours ago

What do you miss from the Desktop app that the CLI doesn’t cover? I’m mostly on Linux too and have just been using the CLI, so I’m curious.

SyneRyder 4 hours ago

I don't think the CLI offers daily routines under the Anthropic subscription anymore?

There's also the cross conversation memory search, which uses a different conversation dataset (the Claude Web / Claude.AI conversations) than Claude Code does. I'm not even sure Claude Code does cross conversation search?

The Desktop interface also presents Markdown as formatted text and presents artifacts (especially interactive ones) better than the CLI can.

All that said - I actually use the CLI for nearly everything (even on Windows). Rather than use Claude Desktop for daily "routines" that are capped at 15 total cron-jobs and use extra usage credits, I think I'll continue building my own minimal harness and move my routines to models from other providers.

Avicebron 3 hours ago

> All that said - I actually use the CLI for nearly everything (even on Windows).

I also haven't touched routines, but I use cc to write automation tasks that will integrate a model when I need an inference layer. Which I also did before routines..

Have people actually been using routines effectively?

filoleg 3 hours ago

> I don't think the CLI offers daily routines under the Anthropic subscription anymore?

It (Claude Code) does, I discovered it by accident recently, having never used daily routines before. Haven't touched Claude Desktop at all, outside of playing with it for 30 mins or so months ago.

TLDR: I used Claude Code to build a command that scrapes job postings from a few employers I am interested in (it is a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist). At the end CC asked me "do you want me to re-run it daily?" I said yes, and it generated a daily routine and gave me a URL to my anthropic account page where I can see all my daily routines.

There, it says that I am currently using up 1 out of 15 "free" daily routines that come with my personal subscription, and I would have to pay extra if I want to have more than 15 active at a time (I assume by switching to per-token pricing for anything beyond 15, but not sure).

tstrimple 4 hours ago

> There's also the cross conversation memory search, which uses a different conversation dataset (the Claude Web / Claude.AI conversations) than Claude Code does. I'm not even sure Claude Code does cross conversation search?

This is one of the first things I “fixed” with skills and hooks. I index every conversation in SQLite and have a skill which knows what to do when I ask it to search the index. I had to avoid the word memory because it’s too tied up in other parts of the context. It even indexes across my different machines. I set this up because I have terrible context discipline. I’ll go off on a tangent in one context and start planning and sometimes implementing something based on that thread which really deserves its own context. Afterward I can create the new context and move relevant bits to it, but I’d lose that initial starting conversation which inherently has more data than the summary in the new context.

I also use a few different related contexts. One where I’m building a game engine in zig and another talking about game ideas. There’s a lot of back and forth going on there which needs some shared context. I solve this with a combination of Claude.md references and that searchable session index.

Everything I do with scheduled tasks are just wired up with systemd and simple scripts. No LLM in the critical execution path. Again a skill tells CC how I manage those scheduled things so I just have to say something like “run this every day at midnight” and CC has reliably taken care of the rest.

outofpaper 10 minutes ago

Recursing 4 hours ago

1. Same experience as my non-Linux coworkers, so we can share learnings and processes

2. Scheduled tasks that run locally ( https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13854387-schedule-rec... ) importantly different from Claude Code routines

3. Multiple projects/isolated memories in the same folder

4. Better UI

nozzlegear 4 hours ago

> Scheduled tasks that run locally ( https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13854387-schedule-rec... ) importantly different from Claude Code routines

What do people do with these? I don't use Claude but when I did I couldn't think of anything useful to do with the routines. I'm probably not being imaginative enough.

jeroenhd 44 minutes ago

thewebguyd an hour ago

baq 3 hours ago

Recursing 3 hours ago

dahkenangnon 4 hours ago

The CLI is good for coding tasks but for other things non coding related, having the desktop app can be very useful

davydm 4 hours ago

Mainly: true sandbox separation. I don't want the model having full access to my machine. With a dump format that Claude understands, I'm able to pass only the files I want Claude to see, and he can't break any of them. I don't care about setting up access lists and so on. I don't trust that the cli product will be properly sanboxed and it's quite clear their software offerings are largely aigen code, and I catch bugs from Claude every day. I also get useful stuff, so it's worth it, but definitely not worth it, imo, to grant it any access to my machine.

mathstuf 4 hours ago

There are a number of utilities for this. I use jai: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/ but also have seen nono: https://github.com/always-further/nono smolvm: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm zerobox https://github.com/afshinm/zerobox and matchlock https://github.com/jingkaihe/matchlock

They all have pros and cons. Pick the one that suits you best. Then you're also agent harness flexible (I use opencode).

johnsonjo 3 hours ago

sophrosyne42 3 hours ago

WhyNotHugo 4 hours ago

The cli works on regular sandboxes just fine (podman, docker, bwrap, etc).

Sandboxing a GUI is typically more operational overhead than sandboxing a cli (mounting compositor sockets, GPU access, etc).

jeena 4 hours ago

I made myself a very simple one from the start when I realized it can access everything on my computer https://git.jeena.net/jeena/agent-container my goal was that it would work transparently and the paths and user, etc. would be just the same as on the host but inside of a docker container.

johnsonjo 4 hours ago

I've been using jai [1] for sandboxing on linux (although I use opencode and local models and not claude code) and I'm pretty satisfied with it. It comes in three different modes [2]: casual mode, strict mode, and bare mode. Here's some descriptions of each mode:

Casual mode [3]: > Your home directory is mounted as a copy-on-write overlay. The jailed process sees your real files, but writes go to $HOME/.jai/default.changes instead of modifying originals, except in the directory where you ran jai. Your current working directory grants full read/write access to code in the jail (unless suppressed with -D). So files deleted there are really gone. /tmp and /var/tmp are private. The rest of the filesystem is read-only.

Strict mode [4]: > The process runs as the unprivileged jai system user, not as you. Home directory is an empty private directory at $HOME/.jai/<name>.home. Granted directories (via -d or cwd) are exposed with id-mapped mounts — files look like they are owned by jai inside the jail. Because the process has a different UID, it cannot read files outside your home directory that are only accessible to your user — this is where confidentiality comes from.

Bare mode [5]: > Home directory is an empty private directory, like strict mode. But the process runs as your user, not as jai. This means it cannot provide confidentiality — the process can still read any file accessible to your UID outside the home directory.

I've always ran my stuff in casual so far just so my whole computer doesn't get rimraffed :P. but I'm thinking of switching to just strict mode, but haven't really vibe coded in a while so I haven't tried it yet.

[1]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/

[2]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html

[3]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html#casual-mode

[4]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html#strict-mode

[5]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html#bare-mode

_aavaa_ 4 hours ago

If you don’t trust the CLI version to be properly sandbox d, why would the desktop one be?

notsirius 4 hours ago

does claude desktop actually solve this issue? I’m on mac and use docker sbx to solve this https://docs.docker.com/ai/sandboxes/get-started/

FergusArgyll 3 hours ago

On Linux you have bubblewrap!

raverbashing 4 hours ago

Or, what does the Desktop app does that the webpage doesn't do?

ddosmax556 26 minutes ago

Anthropic, if you're reading this: I'm a developer trying to figure out LLMs, I use them 8h per day to do my work. Claude Desktop is a missing piece I don't have access to because I'm only on Linux! I'm happy with a simple AppImage.

taspeotis 3 hours ago

Personally I don’t understand why Claude Code doesn’t have a mode to make text green and characters come down from the top of the screen individually, like in The Matrix.

gaiagraphia 2 hours ago

Massively bugs me. I have to wear green sunglasses, change the language to Japanese, and turn my monitor sideways to get any real work done nowadays.

skeledrew 4 hours ago

YES! But also hmm, maybe not. I literally installed the unofficial build[0] a few hours ago, and when I started it and saw a bunch of Electron processes immediately trigger my spawn swarm detector, I just closed it. Don't think I'll ever touch it again.

[0] https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian

aaddrick 4 hours ago

Hey!

That's me, and that sounds weird. Mind giving stone more details so I can help get to the source of it? Or just submit an issue on the repo. Should just be one main electron process.

aaddrick 4 hours ago

Some more details*

himhckr 2 hours ago

Not exactly Claude Desktop but we have something more "generic" that works across multiple OSes (written in Tauri) - Msty Claw [1]. It also comes with a companion E2E encrypted mobile app.

[1]: https://msty.ai/claw/features

robrain 4 hours ago

Just one-shot vibe it for yourself.

Lame, I know, but you have to entertain yourself sometimes when the only thing anybody talks about here is ruddy spicy autocorrect and self-inflicted job destruction.

witx 4 hours ago

> self-inflicted job destruction

Glad someone else sees this as well in this crappy website

zoba 4 hours ago

Also can you please make it easy to switch between my work and personal accounts on mobile!

steezeburger 4 hours ago

Yeah that would be great. I seriously don't understand how a company with this much money doesn't have some of the more basic ux implemented to make it a really great app. Blows my mind.

pacificat0r 2 hours ago

How can they? They are busy designing agentic loops. They ship 8x more lines of code!!!

kentf 2 hours ago

Our app, Runner: Cowork++

Supports linux :)

https://runner.now/

shmoil 4 hours ago

>> Anthropic, please ship an official malware for Linux

Here, fixed it for you.

bytepursuits 3 hours ago

I thought going into ipo they were selling the idea that claude is already build claude.

predkambrij 5 hours ago

Cowork already boots Ubuntu 22.04 internally on macOS. The Linux execution path exists inside the product. What's missing is a published build.

JSeiko 3 hours ago

Yes please! I think it's just kinda weird that this hasn't been done yet.

jeremyjh 4 hours ago

If you feel that strongly about it, why not write the issue description yourself?

rtk_asp an hour ago

"Sources for the load-bearing claims"

I no longer know if this is a real person who is simping for Anthropic and will be ultimately enslaved by Anthropic or if this is an Anthropic ad to have "proof" for the high demand of their services.

applfanboysbgon 42 minutes ago

Neither, it is just a random LLM-generated issue.

zombot 9 minutes ago

It it was an LLM, why didn't it just vibecode the desired software instead of generating ticket spam?

trumpdong an hour ago

Doesn't Wayland make it impossible anyway?

monooso an hour ago

In what way?

trumpdong an hour ago

In the way of eschewing all the APIs that allow an X11 client to control your desktop.

2OEH8eoCRo0 an hour ago

I love the dueling messages on AI

"It'll make software easy and replace all software jobs!"

"Sorry, a Linux client is too hard and too much work!"

dahkenangnon 4 hours ago

We are all waiting for it.

dstnn 3 hours ago

You're better off just using code cli

coretx 3 hours ago

Why dont you ask Claude to write you a TUI ?

cyanydeez 4 hours ago

Why would they do that with their...checks notes...software changing AI?

gaiagraphia 2 hours ago

Anthropic one-shotting a Linux distro would be quite the ad...

Perplexity are devleoping Comet as an AI-powered browser. I wonder if anybody will take the OS leap.

JohnHaugeland 4 hours ago

just use WINE or docker

syllogistic 4 hours ago

> Just use WINE

Did you just tell me to go fuck myself ?

xdavidliu 4 hours ago

pull requests are welcome

shevy-java 2 hours ago

Please don't.

There is already way too much slop.

znpy 4 hours ago

That will come the year after the year of linux on. The desktop /s