Yeah. I just dropped another repackaging repo for Wispr Flow. https://github.com/wispr-flow-linux/wispr-flow-linux

A lot of that is keyboard shortcuts for push-to-talk. Easy right?

X11 is mostly fine, but the world is moving into Wayland. Wayland doesn't have shortcuts native and relies on xdg-desktop-portal, which in turn relies on each backend to implement it's own version.

COSMIC from the Pop!OS team's xdg-desktop-cosmic doesn't support GlobalShortcuts yet (might now, haven't checked in a bit). So XWayland for them.

Tray icons? GNOME doesn't have a tray out of the box, but there's an extension. There's no standard for whether it's light mode or dark mode across distros and when you map out the options, no api's indicate whether the tray is light or dark while in light/dark mode. At some point you have to just accept it's not always perfect or patch in an override.

> Can confirm. At a past company we worked hard to release a Linux desktop client for our customers who wanted it ... you’re getting peppered with complaints from people using distributions you’ve never heard of ... but the problem is in upstream somewhere

You have taken on the work the distributions do in the open source world. No upstream open source developer takes that on. Instead of getting bug reports from users, upstream developers insist bug reports are filtered by the distro maintainer first. They fix problems on their side so you never see them, and the ones that do make it through have been triaged. It's a win for everyone.

So the solution is to handle it the way they do. Choose a couple of baselines: maybe Debian Stable and Fedora. Publish packages for them, and make it plain they are only certified for those platforms. Make the rest someone else's problem: if you want it working on distro X, you package it for distro X. You've done the bulk of the work for them anyway, as most of them are either Debian or RPM based.

Sounds like a product management problem. If you declare that you support RHEL and Ubuntu LTS and LTS-1 yet still process bug reports from other installations, the product owner is not doing their job properly. Any bug reports from Nix or Fedora got to be closed due to a wrong operating environment. Even accepting bug reports from the latest non-LTS Ubuntu release should be avoided.

Yep, I've seen the same issue in video games. A few passionate engineers convince PMs to make a Linux version of the game, they test on few popular distros, everything is great. Then the game launches , and a very very very small minority of Linux users can't run your game, but they file 75% of all your support tickets. If you don't respond to them in the manner they find acceptable, they are extremely vocal on social media about how you as the developer are lazy and incompetent. It's 10000% not worth it for that reason alone. Nowadays I'd personally advocate for making sure the game runs well under Proton and leaving it at that.

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.

> 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++..

I've looked on the rare occasion, but no one is asking for it on the repo, so hadn't been a priority like other distribution channels.

It's great that I can ship one item for all platforms, but Flatpack doesn't solve the compatibility discovery problem for me.

More context in my reply to the comment linked here :https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436#48435661

Anthropic claims 8-fold productivity increase since 2025. If even that isn't enough to enable support for Linux, I don't know what it is.

If only Anthropic had some kind of automated testing, support, planning machine.

> There's also the cross conversation memory search, which uses a different conversation dataset (the Claude Web / Claude.AI conversations) than Claude Code does. I'm not even sure Claude Code does cross conversation search?

This is one of the first things I “fixed” with skills and hooks. I index every conversation in SQLite and have a skill which knows what to do when I ask it to search the index. I had to avoid the word memory because it’s too tied up in other parts of the context. It even indexes across my different machines. I set this up because I have terrible context discipline. I’ll go off on a tangent in one context and start planning and sometimes implementing something based on that thread which really deserves its own context. Afterward I can create the new context and move relevant bits to it, but I’d lose that initial starting conversation which inherently has more data than the summary in the new context.

I also use a few different related contexts. One where I’m building a game engine in zig and another talking about game ideas. There’s a lot of back and forth going on there which needs some shared context. I solve this with a combination of Claude.md references and that searchable session index.

Everything I do with scheduled tasks are just wired up with systemd and simple scripts. No LLM in the critical execution path. Again a skill tells CC how I manage those scheduled things so I just have to say something like “run this every day at midnight” and CC has reliably taken care of the rest.

> I don't think the CLI offers daily routines under the Anthropic subscription anymore?

It (Claude Code) does, I discovered it by accident recently, having never used daily routines before. Haven't touched Claude Desktop at all, outside of playing with it for 30 mins or so months ago.

TLDR: I used Claude Code to build a command that scrapes job postings from a few employers I am interested in (it is a bit more complicated than that, but that's the gist). At the end CC asked me "do you want me to re-run it daily?" I said yes, and it generated a daily routine and gave me a URL to my anthropic account page where I can see all my daily routines.

There, it says that I am currently using up 1 out of 15 "free" daily routines that come with my personal subscription, and I would have to pay extra if I want to have more than 15 active at a time (I assume by switching to per-token pricing for anything beyond 15, but not sure).

> All that said - I actually use the CLI for nearly everything (even on Windows).

I also haven't touched routines, but I use cc to write automation tasks that will integrate a model when I need an inference layer. Which I also did before routines..

Have people actually been using routines effectively?

That makes sense. Maybe the existing VS Code integration is the place to solve part of this for coding workflows: formatted output, artifacts, and search UI all seem useful next to the editor. The Claude.ai conversation corpus/search seems like the part that may need deeper account integration.

There are a number of utilities for this. I use jai: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/ but also have seen nono: https://github.com/always-further/nono smolvm: https://github.com/smol-machines/smolvm zerobox https://github.com/afshinm/zerobox and matchlock https://github.com/jingkaihe/matchlock

They all have pros and cons. Pick the one that suits you best. Then you're also agent harness flexible (I use opencode).

I've been using jai [1] for sandboxing on linux (although I use opencode and local models and not claude code) and I'm pretty satisfied with it. It comes in three different modes [2]: casual mode, strict mode, and bare mode. Here's some descriptions of each mode:

Casual mode [3]: > Your home directory is mounted as a copy-on-write overlay. The jailed process sees your real files, but writes go to $HOME/.jai/default.changes instead of modifying originals, except in the directory where you ran jai. Your current working directory grants full read/write access to code in the jail (unless suppressed with -D). So files deleted there are really gone. /tmp and /var/tmp are private. The rest of the filesystem is read-only.

Strict mode [4]: > The process runs as the unprivileged jai system user, not as you. Home directory is an empty private directory at $HOME/.jai/<name>.home. Granted directories (via -d or cwd) are exposed with id-mapped mounts — files look like they are owned by jai inside the jail. Because the process has a different UID, it cannot read files outside your home directory that are only accessible to your user — this is where confidentiality comes from.

Bare mode [5]: > Home directory is an empty private directory, like strict mode. But the process runs as your user, not as jai. This means it cannot provide confidentiality — the process can still read any file accessible to your UID outside the home directory.

I've always ran my stuff in casual so far just so my whole computer doesn't get rimraffed :P. but I'm thinking of switching to just strict mode, but haven't really vibe coded in a while so I haven't tried it yet.

[1]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/

[2]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html

[3]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html#casual-mode

[4]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html#strict-mode

[5]: https://jai.scs.stanford.edu/modes.html#bare-mode

The cli works on regular sandboxes just fine (podman, docker, bwrap, etc).

Sandboxing a GUI is typically more operational overhead than sandboxing a cli (mounting compositor sockets, GPU access, etc).

If you don’t trust the CLI version to be properly sandbox d, why would the desktop one be?

> Scheduled tasks that run locally ( https://support.claude.com/en/articles/13854387-schedule-rec... ) importantly different from Claude Code routines

What do people do with these? I don't use Claude but when I did I couldn't think of anything useful to do with the routines. I'm probably not being imaginative enough.

> Multiple projects/isolated memories in the same folder

I cannot stand this and do not know how to start a new project/session in a new folder. Even if I select a new folder in the UI when typing the first prompt of a new session, it keeps going back to the first folder I created. For this reason alone I am thinking of going to the CLI. But if anyone has any answers, I am all ears.

The median linux pc user is on Chrome OS from their school :p

There are many laptops with similar specs that you can run Linux on, and for less money

I get it. I wish there were more great laptop makers. I had a maxed out 16in M2 Max MacBook Pro, now I have an 15in M3 MBA. I also have a maxed out HP G1A Ultra running Fedora. They’re all excellent.

I also care about my desktop supporting consumer electronics without having to waste an afternoon debugging Bluetooth drivers every two weeks

It kind of is?

Why would you not want your development environment to be as close to your deployment environment as possible? Even MacOS bash commands have hiccups every so often. In my experience working with Linux developers, they seem to know the internals of the servers much better and can optimize/debug prod fast - and this understanding is only compounded with LLMs.

I'm sure many developers would be equally talented at debugging such issues if we deployed on Windows or MacOS, but virtually no one does that.

Docker was designed for Linux, and on Windows you have to run a VM just to let Docker function.

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To drive fast?

Fair, but it’s electron. They can just add a new target and recompile the native libraries they’re using for Linux.

It’s really not that hard.