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The same as an OS with a UI. Discoverability, fewer actions per activity, easier navigation, faster to learn/lower skill floor, etc. Some highlights:

1. Much better multi-agent orchestration. The app supervises many agents, with different project views and built-in git worktrees, so agents can work on isolated copies of the same repo. It's easy to jump between tasks and see changes. I recall OpenAI wrote that CLI was not designed around this style of work.

2. The app combines multiple terminals, file previews, PR-review workflows, SSH connections, an integrated browser, and page annotations. For front-end stuff, Codex can run the app in Codex for mockups/prototypes, then iterate inside the app. IMHO I think this is a much faster, more intuitive flow.

3. For long-running and recurring agent workflows, I think they're much easier to manage in the app. You get automations, review queues, persistent conversation context, future schedules, and auto resume for longer running tasks. E.g. CI failure summaries, issue triage, and release briefs.

You can do some of the above, to some degree, with varying levels of success in the CLI, but I think it's miles ahead in the app.

You get GUI niceties: a nice presentation of the output like inline markdown rendering including tables and images in a nice font. Input supports drag & drop, and I can actually navigate the input field the way I am used to (pointing and clicking, using keyboard shortcuts to jump to beginning of words / sentences). Not sure what the most modern CLIs support, but for me just the ergonomics of a GUI text field alone are superior.

It's easier to use for most people. I don't think CLI and GUI programs target the same audience.

I'm not ready to try this yet, since after some recent experiences[1] I've decided not to be at the cutting edge of new tools and models for a few weeks or months.

However, from the screenshots and description, I expect that you would have these advantages:

- History. Currently, if you type into the CLI (TUI) your intention and requests are captured in some transcripts, but not in conversational turns. If you want the history of what you typed into the cli/tui you would have to datamine it from transcripts. By contrast, on the screenshots you can see it is a simple conversation that's saved and easy to return to.

- Multiplatform. As per the announcement "Use Codex across ChatGPT, your editor, and the terminal", meaning that you could open the ChatGPT app on your phone and continue to interact with this. While this might not matter to you if you exclusively code while sitting in front of your computer, still, it helps you be able to stay on top of things if you are on mobile.

- Background tasks and autonomous work. It says you can schedule it to do things in the background (issue triage, alert monitoring). At the moment, it would only do this if you've asked either codex or another agent to build a harness for it that does so. (i.e. you could ask Claude to build a harness that calls Codex on some schedule or interval.)

These all seem pretty good and I look forward to starting to use it once it's been more battle-tested.

[1] notably, on the Anthropic side the Opus 5 regressions - I had to downgrade to Opus 4.8 as I found Opus 5 was unreliable. I currently use Opus 4.8 and Codex Sol 5.6.

At least on Windows/Mac, a significant number of users of this app are non developers, and you should tame your expectations about them handling things like "isolation".

Even for developers working on Linux, you'll be surprised how many have never run a docker command in their life.

The Linux version seems to use bubblewrap + seccomp for a "workspace sandbox" automatically, in addition to the auto mode and/or user approval.

A VM would be even better, but people could presumably run this in one if we manage to convince them of higher sandboxing in general ?

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.

Exactly my thoughts! I was expecting a Rust app written from scratch available at least in Qt and GTK flavors , and maybe with a third and a fourth option.

Don't they have agent swarms with infinite tokens?

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.

Linux users have stronger preferences for the terminal than either Windows or macOS users. Even the same person will use the terminal more in Linux than the other two!

> App was released in February & took 6 entire months to port to Linux

Product releases at large companies are slowed dow by coordination and resources more than actual development. (I'm an Electron maintainer who is currently working on better Linux support in the framework, and also a developer/PM for a commercial app that supports Linux.)

It's very likely that the Codex Electron app already "worked" on Linux back in February, as in someone internally could build and run it from source and start a chat session. That fact would have made it possible for a small team to make a business case and start getting support from ops, QA, CS, marketing, legal, etc. The engineers would spend their unlimited tokens on Linux-specific build, packaging, and platform integrations (remember this is a computer use agent) to take the app from a prototype to something a company could actually launch and support for millions of users.

Apps are also a moving target. The entire time building up to release, the Linux desktop app would have been getting feature and design updates for free from the updates going out on Mac/Windows/web. None of those other teams working on those features have have had the time (or the mandate) to coordinate with Linux engineers if they were building a separate app from scratch, and I suspect such a proposal would never have gotten off the ground.

It’s only remarkable if they actually took 6 months of engineering effort to build this. It’s more likely that it just never got prioritized.

Wonder how many will bother using the desktop version on linux. Im on macos and i just use the CLI most of the time

well this just shows how good the AI is at programming

The most remarkable thing is that it was built at all. What self-respecting Linux desktop user wouldn’t be satisfied with the TUI?

It is a marketing expense. We are talking about it. Surely the token cost was worthwhile on that basis alone. Students will likely get some usage out of it, too. But paying a human to do this port would have been an insane thing to do two years ago. I’d be surprised if they have more than 1000 MAUs for this client by the end of the year.

How are you doing testing for desktop apps? any tool recommendation?

Corporate it is a scam pretending to be a job creation program to make sure people dont get funny ideas

i doubt the UI was the hard part. these desktop apps are about computer use. thats where the tricky bits are.

6 months is way too long IMHO

My biggest gripe is now anytime I open a new session it hangs and I see the beachball spinner (mac) for a while before I can actually use the app again. It's pretty brutal.

Same. I was quite confused. [This page](https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/app) offers the Linux download link if anyone is interested.

Uhh.. you can't do what codex/claude can do from a browser. Are you this out of the loop?

But you might. And Codex is taking your threats seriously and stand prepared in case you breach protocol and start using your computer resources for your own nefarious purpose.

These apps stands as last defense between users and legitimate owners of compute resources that is electron and pals.

Sitting at 2.2GB of combined resident RAM across 11 processes. I haven't done a single query yet.

Surely they can just vibe is down to a reasonable footprint, right? Right?

Is this a linux issue? My Macbook has 16gb ram and running out has literally never been an issue for me. I'm using all of it + 10gb of swap and my computer feels snappy and fast. Chrome with 100+ tabs, discord, slack, codex, chatgpt, all running simultaneously with no issues. Sure, all other things being equal less RAM usage is better, but I can understand why reducing it isn't a priority for them.

Chromebooks do this and people avoid them

Remote alone makes the desktop app worth it.

I've been using it to vibe code a personal application while I'm using a more "powerful" setup for my main agent assisted coding, and I have to say that it's been very good so far. I just wished that it was easier to hand off some tasks to codex web, like I tried to do today as I was starting a boat trip.

And that's not a joke, I made the mistake of installing this on my Windows machine just to test it out quickly last week.

It created 2 new users and then assigned new NTFS permissions for every single file under my user directory to them. This of course wrecked havoc, ssh refused to work, several applications refusing to start and a ton of permission errors. It did this without even a warning in the background and it also does not undo any of it when you uninstall it.

It took around 3 hours to fix it by updating ~10 million NTFS permissions for every single file under my user directory.

With exception of VSCode, because I have no choice due to some plugins, or apps required by customer projects where I have no other option as well, nothing else based on Electron pollutes my computers.

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.

They ship with their own sandboxing by default, and Codex specifically is open source.

HN comment quality took a nosedive recently, You can predict the comments just based on the story, almost all of them cynical and snarky remarks. It used to be a place to come and learn from technical experts.

A challenge of releasing tech on a platform of people that are picky about tech.

Spinning this as a generous Linux port misses the elephant in the room: This is spyware that drags your system down to the level of Windows.

> I find it almost funny how hostile the response is when a company actually goes through the effort of supporting Linux.

How magnanimous: they make the effort to support the OS their entire company is based on? It's not just for training the model and hosting them: it's also to run them, where they constantly use Linux to do their thing.

Without Linux, there's no OpenAI.

So I take it the Linux community should be so grateful that OpenAI supports Linux, right?

It’s almost like we Linux users are opinionated about software. Weird. /s

While it may not be the majority of Linux usage, there’s a pretty big uptake in Linux desktop these days, and there millions of people actively using Linux desktop distros

It'd be nice for sending prompts from phone, although it is a whole lot of bloat for just that feature. Par for the course for the AI era, in order to do a thing first you must import the universe.

ok, but you know these things are marketed as super products; it's pretty easy for me to use a local model to scale up almost any project on github. Why would this be an effective moat beyond "I use codex too!!"

Because it would be stupid to do so?

I prefer the CLI myself, but I could imagine:

- nicer diff rendering, and directly mentioning parts of a diff

- Latex rendering (pretty annoying in the CLI, you have to actively tell Codex it's running in a terminal and replace Latex syntax with UTF-8 glyphs)

Probably ecause OpenAI wants training data from PCs of people who are scared of CLIs as well

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.

A real issue we have run into is that "computer use" features, which is absolutely a big no-no at our company, can be enabled with a single click, and we cannot configure that.

I made something similar using Tauri but there were visual inconsistencies between platforms thanks to webkit. At the time I remember thinking I wish I had used electron to buy cross platform parity.

And I experimented with gpui from zed, that was even harder to work with.

Of course they could chase performance, but ultimately time to market is the #1 factor right now, and coding agents still aren't good enough to just immediately realize an entire GPUI app from scratch with nothing more than a figma design. Still requires a ton of oversight.

It's built on OWL, which is their own Chromium integration. It's not electron.

Seems pretty solid for Mac, but idk about Windows and Linux.

https://openai.com/index/building-chatgpt-atlas/

Because electron gets shit done? Aside the memory usage, electron/browser based applications of any complexity tend to be better and develop a lot faster.

More testing you still need good engineers for every native platform if you go native. We all know that AI in the hands of incompetent people is bad.

You're unable to use non CLI tools? How do you interact with the Internet then?

I have a codex cli instance on a Debian VM connected to ChatGPT on iOS via SSH. That works since.. about a month and has pretty good UX. Before, I used the shellfish terminal and tmux which also worked really good, but to be honest (even though I'm a big terminal fan), ChatGPT on iOS sometimes has a smoother UX than a terminal.

Codex CLI should have been usable for a while now, and you could also sign in to your ChatGPT subscription using Opencode which runs perfectly fine on a Raspberry Pi.

It has a full web browser in it

Because apparently ChatGPT is not able to generate native apps, so desktop developers are safe. /s

Outside Linux, on Windows/Mac, plenty of non developers much prefer the "desktop UI" experience over CLI. Some can't work with CLIs at all.

Even with Linux, there are more people -- including many non software engineers -- that are installing Linux on their home computers and may be interested in this.

Bear in mind that HN users don't remotely resemble the general population, or even employees at a tech company -- there are lots of people in finance, business, legal etc who could potentially benefit from this.

Latex rendering, inline images, inline browser showing what it's clicking on, being able to view a spreadsheet and then select a region to reference in the conversation, clickable links when it references a specific line number with mouse-over previews, interactive inline visualisations.

There's probably more I don't remember too. In my opinion TUI apps are just silly. You don't get any of the advantages of it being just plain text because it's all wrapped in funny Unicode characters and at the same time the GUI capabilities are hamstrung by being text on a grid.

With claude, the difference I noticed is that you can run their cloud enviroment from GUI app, as well as connect to remote machine. Sure, remote connection is nothing interesting, but I'm not aware if claude cli can work with cloud based enviroment. Also claude design is alvaliable on claude gui app. But all of these can be accessed with the browser as well, only the local machine access is something that browser version doesn't have. But for that you can use cli... Really mess of the tools they are shipping. Waiting (not) for Claude/Openai OS

I think one advantage is that you can control it remotely via the chatgpt mobile app. I don't know why they don't allow that for regular codex...

I use it on my macbook. The computer use is pretty sweet.

It can be controlled from your phone once paired, and it lets you actually see agents that it orchestrates in the threads. Also if you use MCP Apps, it can integrate those into threads.

I'm only familiar with the Anthropic equivalent, but the cognitive load is different as opposed to necessarily better or worse. I have friends who prefer mousing around the UI.

Tabs for long-running often-compacted sessions is a difference I've noticed in emergent UX.

Adequate text editing is the main one for me.

I think you can connect your phone and talk to codex remotely, so you can run programming prompts while afk

does the app eat more money that codex cli? I mean is there a difference in cost in asking via the app something vs the cli?

Electron is just another god damn GUI toolkit! What's the fundamental difference between it and, say, GTK4? It's just fucking widgets!

My real problem with Electron is the multi-process render architecture, which I think is pointless for the "just a GUI toolkit" case of rendering only trusted content. I'm 100% fine with Slack, Spotify, whatever using Electron as their choice of GUI toolkits. These come and go. I'm miffed that they use multiple processes when there's no real security boundary between them just because there is a security boundary in the homologous scenario on the web.

You can definitely do that, but it is your duty and it cannot be delegated.

Also these things are supposed to help you, their idea is that you give it access and it's helpful proportional to the access you give it. A separate user works for some, especially when vibecoding, you whitelist accesses. But for general computer usage, an assistant that has access to your files and acts as a sort of OS needs your user access.

it can consume more of your RAM

On Windows you definitely want to exclude your code directories from AV and use a dev drive

You have "send feedback" button in the app. Something tells me that it's much better place to report issues with the app rather than comment section on unrelated website.

I think their backend data probably shows that very few Chinese users are using Codex through the official way, and the number of those who have switched to the Chinese interface is even smaller, so there’s not much incentive to fix this issue.

Access to your computer

None that I can see - I already have it installed as a chrome app on my Mint desktop, and it seems identical.

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