OpenAI launches ChatGPT desktop app for Linux

2 days ago (techcrunch.com)

Am I understanding correctly that I still can't run a headless session on my VPS in a way that let's me use remote control for a better 1st party mobile experience that doesn't require my laptop to be awake?

I really don't want to have to boot into a whole desktop Ubuntu instance simply to run this.

I've gone as far as starting to build my own handoff layer with Hermes as I want to use codex purely for coding in a more isolated fashion and not have it co-mingle my memory and unrelated sensitive context and tool calls. The newly announced integration was so close to what I wanted and yet so far for anyone that wants to keep sensitive data separated.

I wish they offered a consumer zero data retention plan.

  • > Am I understanding correctly that I still can't run a headless session on my VPS in a way that let's me use remote control for a better 1st party mobile experience that doesn't require my laptop to be awake?

    What exactly are you trying to do here? I have codex running on a VPS (headlessly) and I can use it just fine, ssh into the box and do "tmux attach" or whatever you use for such things. Where does your laptop come into play here and how is it related?

    • Specifically, I want to use the ChatGPT Android app to use it like I would a desktop remote control session. It is a nice mobile interface. I do not want to have to use a mobile terminal app like Termius. The UX is awful.

  • They had a headless remote mode for a while, specifically for that purpose. Are you sure you checked well?

I have it open in a browser tab, and I have the codex cli. What are the features/advantages this has over the old way?

  • It's the same ever-long battle of "one new window with many tabs" vs "many tabs in existing window". Either you have a terminal window with N tabs for each Codex session, or you have one Codex Desktop window with all Codex sessions.

    I don't necessarily think one is "correct" or "better" than the other, just different. Different user behaviors will favor different approaches.

  • You can do remote control / handoff with it, i.e. start on desktop and move to mobile. doesn't work with the cli

  • the desktop ui is considerably nicer to use if you ever find yourself switching between terminal tabs

Nice - I've been considering re-subscribing to OpenAI to try out their new models. This is just the push I needed. Looking forward to trying it on Fedora 44.

How do you somehow make a cross OS browser platform only work on one OS in the first place?

  • Easy, hire only people using macOS and whatever you ask them to build, unless it's explicitly cross-platform, will most likely only work on macOS, especially if you ask them to build a GUI application.

    Not sure how this is strange?

I've been extracting the asar and using it for a while on linux, I rarely start it but it's nice that I can start a session in chatgpt and then move on to codex in the same UI.

It's packed with features, voice mode, browser. I'm not really the target audience..

Does it run a VM under the covers like the Claude desktop app does?

I've passed on the Claude desktop app for that reason, despite being curious about the "Routines" feature that isn't available in the Claude Code CLI.