Comment by lucideer
8 hours ago
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
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.
LOL!
Though as someone who shipped commercial software on Linux, it wasn't that bad, you just had to ship everything other than the kernel.
LOL. Conveniently, electron is everything other than the kernel. Also, as much wasted RAM as an entire second instance of chrome that shares nothing, but oh well.
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With the AI, we can finally have the year of desktop Linux.
Microsoft used to ship a Linux binary for Teams, but they stopped doing that. Guess the tech was lost.
It sucked.
Download Edge for Linux and use the PWA. It's still crap but at least it kind of works mostly.
I'm not usually one to defend Microsoft, but since Teams works great in a browser, I actually prefer it that way. My video conference doesn't need access to my whole filesystem and an opacity layer that prevents me from seeing what it does. I actually applaud them for supporting browsers as well as they do.
Yes, except it only worked some of the time on some of the distros (mainly Ubuntu/Debian variants of a certain vintage).
Nonetheless, it's the year og the linux desktop!
Yeah idk what OpenAI was thinking. Just going off their own claims… OpenAI must be filled with bozos to not be able to utilize their own supposed product capabilities…
Same with Anthropic and their "support" team, which seems to be Claude 0.1 run on a commodore 64 in the basement...
It's the exact opposite. They picked the easiest way, done countless times just fine by everyone else and still failed
AppImage, yawn.
I think they were joking...
Yet I have to install a not very famous, maybe unmaintained daemon to get basic system integration
> 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.
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?
They replaced a pretty decent native Swift Mac app (with only some chronic state management bugs), weighing ~100MB ish, with the Codex app that most people don't need, made in Electron, which takes minimum 5GB+ including filesystem cruft. Today I ran into a memory leak that froze the app and made the Renderer process take 5GB, then 10GB of RAM.
That was after I asked it to only touch 3 text files in its working directory, after which it sparked macOS permission prompts to access my Desktop, Documents, Downloads, and other apps' data. Thank god for the web platform and web apps.
"Thank god for the web platform and web apps."
They can be amazing. But you can write shitty code in them like anywhere else.
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What! They replaced the native mac app with this?!
> They replaced a pretty decent native Swift Mac app (with only some chronic state management bugs), weighing ~100MB ish, with the Codex app that most people don't need, made in Electron.
Not even a $1T dollar company wants to maintain a native Swift Mac app even though they have AI models to build native apps for every platform.
Maybe they thought Electron would save them tokens to build the feature once and it works everywhere rather than spending more tokens on building the same feature on 3 platforms.
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I hate the new app aswell but you can still get the old one called ChatGPT Classic. Just scroll down to the bottom of the download site.
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It’s apple fault that swift and swift ui is completely garbage.
I have already created a croos-platform solitaire game in Rust with Opus 4.5. Done in one evening. I absolutely do not understand why OpenAI could not write a proper application in 6 months. Do they struggle to use the product they sell?
I am thinking about this too. I mean they have access to the highest level models and still they just produced a garbage.
They probably just don't see it worth the extra effort. And maybe they want to keep it in sync with the web UI.
It definitely is a fraction of the work these days to maintain three different desktop apps + two different mobile apps + a web app. But it's still a lot more work than an Electron app that is merely tweaked between platforms.
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.
Text rendering is:
1. generally done well by many different UI frameworks
2. generally done better by most popular native UI frameworks than what Electron provides
BUT - those UI frameworks are typically not (very) cross-platform. In that context, Electron provides one of the best unified text-rendering stories of cross-platform options. But definitely far from the best overall.
Wonder how many will bother using the desktop version on linux. Im on macos and i just use the CLI most of the time
The desktop app is actually really good (esp on macos). I used to be CLI only, but after trying it recently it's super convenient. Much easier to manage multiple projects simultaneously and it has a built in diff viewer, file browser/reader, terminal, side chat interface, etc.
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