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Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

Anything that isn’t very simple? Like a llm chat interface? If zoom and Microsoft Teams of all people can do it, anthropic should be able to.

Have you considered that maybe their code is just bad?

Microsoft gave up on teams for linux, the app that's available now is a community electron webapp wrapper, and Zoom isn't electron at all, its QT but they chose the path of only supporting a few distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, RedHat) and they also don't rely on system QT versions, they vendor it.

If your app is open source, I say just build & test on one of the major distros and let the community port it to others. If its closed source, well, good luck. But if what the parent said is true, that you now collect a bunch of very vocal pissed off customers because you didn't support their favorite distro, then its just not worth it at the current marketshare that desktop Linux has.

There's also the challenge of you just can't make any assumptions about what may be present or not on someone's Linux machine, even with the major distros.

According to the latest SO dev survey Ubuntu has 28% market share among developers. Considering coding seems to be the one place LLMs have found product market fit, I’m not sure how you can make the argument that the market share is too small. For other companies, absolutely. For ones marketing towards developers, seems like a mistake.

How many devs use or would use a GUI app vs. just claude code in the terminal? My guess is not too many.

I personally think they should port it, but, the developer product does already run on Linux, in the terminal, as is the case with the majority of other dev tools.

Using a largely-stock Ubuntu desktop for work the past 6 years, Zoom has also been one of the most broken mainstream apps I've every used on any system ever. I appreciate they provide a native Linux option, but it has consistently been barely functional—often fully unusable to where I'd join important calls from the browser instead.

If all you want is a chat interface you can install Claude.ai as a PWA. The value proposition of the Claude desktop app includes being able to screenshot and interact with desktop app windows, the file system, etc. That drags you into desktop environment and compositor API hell.

I assume it would be chrome debug, and their chrome plugin, like it is on macos and windows. They could punt arbitrary app control easily enough.

> I don’t think a for profit company has provided a GTK or qt app for Linux in the last 20 years.

DaVinci resolve is QT. But making a video editor performant in Electron is even harder than writing it in C++..

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