Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Nobody should be installing or using AI apps. Your browser is as far as they should go.
Reminder that the macOS app went from "this is fairly well made" to "it downloads multiple gigabytes of random things and doesn't follow any design conventions nor standards"
The Linux app will fail the same tests.
- Uhh.. you can't do what codex/claude can do from a browser. Are you this out of the loop?
- I wonder why operating systems aren't integrating with browsers more.by Kinrany
- Chromebooks do this and people avoid themby alightsoul
- Nothing executes more unverified untrusted code than a web browser will. You want some separation between it and everything else you have going on.by hx8
- Unrelated to this Linux release but I've been using the new ChatGPT desktop app since I annoying updated on accident, and I haven't had that great of an experience.
I previously really enjoyed the Codex app. It was easy for me to understand and find what I needed. The conversation view provided the right amount of information without feeling too concise or full of jargon and the typographic hierarchy made it easy to skim. The project based workflow made sense for my needs.
Ever since they combined all ChatGPT into one app though it has become a mess. It's trying to do too much in one. The settings menu is especially bloated, and I find the UI to be too complicated for the simple questions I'm asking outside of development work. I would rather just use the web interface for general use at this point. They've also been updating much of the UI to follow the same patterns as Claude, and I've not been impressed with the Claude desktop app.
To me, they are taking multiple steps backwards. I hope they eventually find their way again.
by miguel-muniz - 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.by wuliwong
- Reminder to everyone, treat these as trojans. Run them isolated from the rest of your system.
Give it a full desktop in a VM if you want to, just not direct access to your system.
by cloudie78 - 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.by fragmede
- They ship with their own sandboxing by default, and Codex specifically is open source.by perching_aix
- 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.by pjmlp
- 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.
by debazel - More details here: https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/linux/linux-appby btibor91
- 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
by lucideer - 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.by paxys
- 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!by s_dev
- well this just shows how good the AI is at programmingby xbmcuser
- Wonder how many will bother using the desktop version on linux. Im on macos and i just use the CLI most of the timeby yokoprime
- > 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.
by mitchchn - 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.
by randusername - 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?
by darkwater - 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.by SyneRyder
- FYI; This link shows Codex based on your current OS. I get a norwegian landing page with a download link for Windows.by torh
- Same. I was quite confused. [This page](https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/app) offers the Linux download link if anyone is interested.by Gareth321
- The testimonials at the bottom are all from AI companies.
Linux users are kind of averse to trojans. You should call it Back Orifice For Linux. You don't even have to change the OpenAI logo!
by 23qsGa1 - This will make it much easier to trap people into installing it without any isolation just to their primary user account or even make it run with admin privileges by default.
With the recent security related events we already see that it seems to be wide spread practice that many operators avoid the hassle of isolating their agents.
It is just an incredible cultural experience to see how quick stupidity gets accepted as a behavioural default.
by BodyCulture - 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 ?
by usef- - 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.
by fg137 - For someone who has not tried these desktop apps: what is the the advantage versus cli codex with some MPCs and multiple folders each one with their context files?by pdhborges
- Not using it day today but projects and pinned session seem useful, mentallyby nsonha