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