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.
> 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.
Well, with RAM being so cheap, why bother trying to trying to be memory efficient? It's not like OpenAI has an infinite pool of "AI" software engineers to work on this...
Yeah, I was kind of surprised recently that there's no solid native way to build desktop apps on Linux! I was thinking I'd build something actually native with AI but then the options were QT or or gtk...
You don't care what were you trying to build but for a quick me alone Linux app I used Flutter.
Honestly it's my go-to when I want to have a quick native app on any platform but dont want to bundle electron.
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…
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.
> 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.
What better way to showcase their tools capabilities than to deliver apps that are native, efficient, and integrate well with the host system? By compromising with Electron and making mediocre, bloated software they are signaling that they just aren't there yet.
It would be like Ford buying Hondas for their company cars. It might save them money but it sends the wrong message.
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 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.
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.
Unrelated to this Linux release but I've been using the new ChatGPT desktop app since I annoying updated on accident, and I haven't had that great of an experience.
I previously really enjoyed the Codex app. It was easy for me to understand and find what I needed. The conversation view provided the right amount of information without feeling too concise or full of jargon and the typographic hierarchy made it easy to skim. The project based workflow made sense for my needs.
Ever since they combined all ChatGPT into one app though it has become a mess. It's trying to do too much in one. The settings menu is especially bloated, and I find the UI to be too complicated for the simple questions I'm asking outside of development work. I would rather just use the web interface for general use at this point. They've also been updating much of the UI to follow the same patterns as Claude, and I've not been impressed with the Claude desktop app.
To me, they are taking multiple steps backwards. I hope they eventually find their way again.
And that's not a joke, I made the mistake of installing this on my Windows machine just to test it out quickly last week.
It created 2 new users and then assigned new NTFS permissions for every single file under my user directory to them. This of course wrecked havoc, ssh refused to work, several applications refusing to start and a ton of permission errors. It did this without even a warning in the background and it also does not undo any of it when you uninstall it.
It took around 3 hours to fix it by updating ~10 million NTFS permissions for every single file under my user directory.
I've been using GPT through opencode for quite some time on linux. I have had a great time with getting it to help me through computer use and it has been a game changer for me.
For instance recently, media downloads on my NAS became quite a bit slower. I asked it to investigate and it quickly got back to me saying the issue was the ethernet link had been downgraded to 100Mbps from 1Gbps. It even went through journalctl to tell me when this had happened. To fix it I just had to plug an ethernet cable out and back in. Now this is the kind of thing, earlier I would have to spend an evening on. But given an open system like Linux, a well made safe model just makes it so much more accessible than having to RTFM for one off things I am sure to forget in a month.
I dont really let it run loose through my systems, and keep an eye on the thinking traces it puts out and the permissions it asks for. But now I dont have to slog through manuals and deal with gruff people on the internet. I can choose to do so after the fact, depending on how much free time and curiosity I have.
I would love to see your prompt(s) and how you managed to make it do this.
I’ve been using Codex in full access mode constantly for the past couple months on a Pro plan and I haven’t had a single incident like this. I’ve used it across macOS, Linux, and Windows as well, so my usage isn’t limited to a specific setup either.
I never sent any prompts to it, it did all of this during the installation. Here is one related GitHub issue I found for it https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/12343 Looks like they don't intend to change this.
Your earlier post is misleading, since "it" sounds like the model, not the installer. (of course if the latter was created by the former, its basically the same complaint, but I suspect what you are talking about was a deliberate design decision by a human)
The problem doesn't exist when granting codex full access. Codex makes you choose upon first launch to "Set up default sandbox" or to "Use non-admin sandbox". The default option creates two new users and messes with NTFS permissions.
> I’ve been using Codex in full access mode constantly for the past couple months on a Pro plan and I haven’t had a single incident like this. I’ve used it across macOS,
That is not how it works: the "but it works for me" is a logical fallacy.
Haven't you followed a bit all the posts about models, for example, escaping their environments?
The "but it works for me" is a random data point: an anecdote.
That there are people / companies where models ran wild and destroyed files / messed up projects is a fact.
When there are documented cases of stuff gone wrong, people must find ways to protect their data.
We literally see posts frontpage, daily, about AI sandboxing and we regularly see posts about AI escapes or AI SNAFUs.
And you come and post "show me your prompt, for it works on my machine"...
If you’re doing that anyway you might as well install a hypervisor and layer your OS on top. That way you can snapshot before your LLM with root fucks everything up again.
With exception of VSCode, because I have no choice due to some plugins, or apps required by customer projects where I have no other option as well, nothing else based on Electron pollutes my computers.
If I have to deliver in technology X, customer isn't going to be happy getting Y instead, and I am not making my life miserable to work with editors lacking the specific tools, or that are forbidden by customer IT to be installed on provided equipment.
If your hypothetical client as security measure ONLY permits VSCode on a dedicated box you’re obligated to work on and have no control over - then I pray for you.
And for your hypothetical client.
Especially as judging by your description they despite this allow any VSCode plugin to be installed alongside it.
> and I am not making my life miserable to work with editors lacking the specific tools
And that’s the self-imposed prison I was talking about, there’s always alternative tools. In my mind a specific tool is something like Ghidra.
I see you never worked in enterprise consulting with either laptops or cloud VMs managed by customer IT, and where elevated actions require either IT tickets, or elevation tools with description fields why the operation is required, with development done with specific team accounts.
Many official, high-quality language support plugins are only available for VSCode. For some languages, you have a “choice” to use another IDE in the same sense that you have a choice to do programming with a hex editor. Lean being an example, where every alternative is in its infancy.
"The American private sector is the most innovative and
technologically advanced in the world, and its scale,
speed, and capacity secure a critical offensive cyber
advantage for the United States."
Since we now have three "Codex"es, I think it's worth specifying you're talking about codex-cli/tui. Codex the hosted version and Codex the GUI are both fully proprietary I think (besides the codex-cli/tui parts they use, I'm guessing mainly the app-server stuff).
How do I get it to fix my Bluetooth if I do that? If you've been AI-pilled, 2026 is the year of Linux desktop because instead of dicking around with config files, I can just tell AI to fix python.
> How do I get it to fix my Bluetooth if I do that?
Manual tool calls. I ask AI to give me all the necessary reconnaissance commands, then I run them myself on the host and paste the output on the terminal with the SSH connection into the guest virtual machine where the harness is running. The AI then either figures it out and gives me the answer or runs additional tool calls by me. Repeat until annoying task is done, interrupt if anything suspicious shows up at any point.
I haven't had bluetooth issues in years, but I did have an agent reverse engineer a smartphone app that was required for programming some BT headphones. Now I can push my desired runtime settings automatically to the headphones when they connect to my computer
So, yes, I would say agents are pretty good at working with Bluetooth on Linux
If you want to be security conscious don’t give it access to your system directly. Ask it to guide you through the information gathering part of the problem solving process and use your brain and judgment if it actually needs the information/data it’s attempting to access.
If you can’t make that judgement call because of lack of knowledge/familiarity it’s okay - spawn a new fresh chat, get up to speed on the topic first and then resume.
That way you accomplish three things: you learn something new, you fix your problem and you don’t let a Trojan do whatever the hell it wants to your box which among other thing contains all the browser sessions and cookies :)
Also note, that RAG and even vector search are more paths of the early days that didn't prove too valuable. Just let your agent search it directly and optionally create an index as a default entrypoint for common topics.
Bluetooth is the one thing I had problems in the past on GNU/Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. Linux is the only mentioned platform where you could technically give Codex root and let it fix it :)
I guess OpenBSD is the only OS where I never had any problem with Bluetooth audio.
That is also what I do now (both with NixOs and Guix Os), both for personal computers and for servers.
- I inspect the agent's changes, and only apply them - at once - if they are OK. So I have no half applied bad changes to my system, and I can catch critical mistakes before they are applied.
- I can roll back the changes by just doing a `git revert` and reapplying
- The agent cannot read secrets or unrelated data, just config.
- The agent gets the full configuration of all systems at once, without having to maintain parallel documentation (which can get out of sync) or rediscover each time from scratch (access my running systems, for example with `ssh root@server`).
- It's harder for the agent to miss some aspect of the configuration, because it's all in my dotfiles. If it's not there, it's nowhere
I find it almost funny how hostile the response is when a company actually goes through the effort of supporting Linux. Apparently shipping the Linux version is only step one, you also need to pick the right framework, use the right packaging, consume the right amount of RAM, and preferably rewrite it natively.
HN comment quality took a nosedive recently, You can predict the comments just based on the story, almost all of them cynical and snarky remarks. It used to be a place to come and learn from technical experts.
The AI boosters have driven away all experts. They are either financially invested or mindless power users on the level of the proverbial MacOS fanboys.
Experts related to real programming topics are gone or silent. AI experts have never even been here in the first place. It is all about Electron apps, prompts, agents and other bullshit.
> I find it almost funny how hostile the response is when a company actually goes through the effort of supporting Linux.
How magnanimous: they make the effort to support the OS their entire company is based on? It's not just for training the model and hosting them: it's also to run them, where they constantly use Linux to do their thing.
Without Linux, there's no OpenAI.
So I take it the Linux community should be so grateful that OpenAI supports Linux, right?
This will make it much easier to trap people into installing it without any isolation just to their primary user account or even make it run with admin privileges by default.
With the recent security related events we already see that it seems to be wide spread practice that many operators avoid the hassle of isolating their agents.
It is just an incredible cultural experience to see how quick stupidity gets accepted as a behavioural default.
At least on Windows/Mac, a significant number of users of this app are non developers, and you should tame your expectations about them handling things like "isolation".
Even for developers working on Linux, you'll be surprised how many have never run a docker command in their life.
A proof that normies just can't handle security is that when OS X came to be, many Mac OS users used to ask how to disable the root/regular user dichotomy.
Or the long process to educate Windows users, and developers as well, to not run as Administrator.
Bubblewrap gets a bit confused inside a Docker container. If anyone knows how to run Codex inside a Docker container on Linux without it constantly complaining about a broken bubblewrap, please tell.
> If anyone knows how to run Codex inside a Docker container on Linux without it constantly complaining about a broken bubblewrap, please tell.
Why would you even use bubblewrap once it's running in a container? I've been running Codex in a container since it was publicly available, not even sure what you'd use bubblewrap for when you already separated codex from the rest of your filesystem?
But you might. And Codex is taking your threats seriously and stand prepared in case you breach protocol and start using your computer resources for your own nefarious purpose.
These apps stands as last defense between users and legitimate owners of compute resources that is electron and pals.
Outside Linux, on Windows/Mac, plenty of non developers much prefer the "desktop UI" experience over CLI. Some can't work with CLIs at all.
Even with Linux, there are more people -- including many non software engineers -- that are installing Linux on their home computers and may be interested in this.
Bear in mind that HN users don't remotely resemble the general population, or even employees at a tech company -- there are lots of people in finance, business, legal etc who could potentially benefit from this.
I’m a developer, daily driving Linux, and prefer GUI apps. Would’ve used Sublime Text if clangd plugin worked. Hence stuck with Emacs. Open Code GUI sucks compared to their TUI though.
Latex rendering, inline images, inline browser showing what it's clicking on, being able to view a spreadsheet and then select a region to reference in the conversation, clickable links when it references a specific line number with mouse-over previews, interactive inline visualisations.
There's probably more I don't remember too. In my opinion TUI apps are just silly. You don't get any of the advantages of it being just plain text because it's all wrapped in funny Unicode characters and at the same time the GUI capabilities are hamstrung by being text on a grid.
With claude, the difference I noticed is that you can run their cloud enviroment from GUI app, as well as connect to remote machine. Sure, remote connection is nothing interesting, but I'm not aware if claude cli can work with cloud based enviroment.
Also claude design is alvaliable on claude gui app.
But all of these can be accessed with the browser as well, only the local machine access is something that browser version doesn't have. But for that you can use cli...
Really mess of the tools they are shipping. Waiting (not) for Claude/Openai OS
I use it on my macbook. The computer use is pretty sweet.
It can be controlled from your phone once paired, and it lets you actually see agents that it orchestrates in the threads. Also if you use MCP Apps, it can integrate those into threads.
I'm only familiar with the Anthropic equivalent, but the cognitive load is different as opposed to necessarily better or worse. I have friends who prefer mousing around the UI.
Tabs for long-running often-compacted sessions is a difference I've noticed in emergent UX.
I use the CLI, too, but I enjoy watchinng people use the desktop apps. It seems like the desktop apps may be a little bit better suited for human-in-the-loop work. If you're already switching back and forth between a mouse, having an IDE running may make more sense.
The best feeling has to be in the CLI, in my oppinion. A low-stakes project where you can let ultracode runaway from you in the CLI is the most fun.
Nobody should be installing or using AI apps. Your browser is as far as they should go.
Reminder that the macOS app went from "this is fairly well made" to "it downloads multiple gigabytes of random things and doesn't follow any design conventions nor standards"
Codex CLI should have been usable for a while now, and you could also sign in to your ChatGPT subscription using Opencode which runs perfectly fine on a Raspberry Pi.
For someone who has not tried these desktop apps: what is the the advantage versus cli codex with some MPCs and multiple folders each one with their context files?
The same as an OS with a UI. Discoverability, fewer actions per activity, easier navigation, faster to learn/lower skill floor, etc. Some highlights:
1. Much better multi-agent orchestration. The app supervises many agents, with different project views and built-in git worktrees, so agents can work on isolated copies of the same repo. It's easy to jump between tasks and see changes. I recall OpenAI wrote that CLI was not designed around this style of work.
2. The app combines multiple terminals, file previews, PR-review workflows, SSH connections, an integrated browser, and page annotations. For front-end stuff, Codex can run the app in Codex for mockups/prototypes, then iterate inside the app. IMHO I think this is a much faster, more intuitive flow.
3. For long-running and recurring agent workflows, I think they're much easier to manage in the app. You get automations, review queues, persistent conversation context, future schedules, and auto resume for longer running tasks. E.g. CI failure summaries, issue triage, and release briefs.
You can do some of the above, to some degree, with varying levels of success in the CLI, but I think it's miles ahead in the app.
> The app supervises many agents, with different project views and built-in git worktrees, so agents can work on isolated copies of the same repo. It's easy to jump between tasks and see changes.
This is mostly true with Codex and Claude Code Desktop, but gets a bit trickier with 3rd party tools.
I tried out some others and both Paseo and Kepler felt a little bit clunky especially around sub-agents and workflows (even if they let me have both OpenCode and Claude Code with different providers in the same UI). And OpenCode is plain lovely in the terminal but sorta okay in the browser: compare its display of sub-agents to what Claude Code does, for example; their tabbed interface also feels a tad less pleasant than the vertical menu of projects + sessions that most others are settling on, not their old look with icon per project, that was worse. There's definitely ample room for better tooling, then again early IDEs were far worse, so hopefully ADEs will get more polish eventually!
Still, regardless of what you use and across how many providers, it's nice to have everything in a single familiar interface, if you need that.
You get GUI niceties: a nice presentation of the output like inline markdown rendering including tables and images in a nice font. Input supports drag & drop, and I can actually navigate the input field the way I am used to (pointing and clicking, using keyboard shortcuts to jump to beginning of words / sentences).
Not sure what the most modern CLIs support, but for me just the ergonomics of a GUI text field alone are superior.
I'm not ready to try this yet, since after some recent experiences[1] I've decided not to be at the cutting edge of new tools and models for a few weeks or months.
However, from the screenshots and description, I expect that you would have these advantages:
- History. Currently, if you type into the CLI (TUI) your intention and requests are captured in some transcripts, but not in conversational turns. If you want the history of what you typed into the cli/tui you would have to datamine it from transcripts. By contrast, on the screenshots you can see it is a simple conversation that's saved and easy to return to.
- Multiplatform. As per the announcement "Use Codex across ChatGPT, your editor, and the terminal", meaning that you could open the ChatGPT app on your phone and continue to interact with this. While this might not matter to you if you exclusively code while sitting in front of your computer, still, it helps you be able to stay on top of things if you are on mobile.
- Background tasks and autonomous work. It says you can schedule it to do things in the background (issue triage, alert monitoring). At the moment, it would only do this if you've asked either codex or another agent to build a harness for it that does so. (i.e. you could ask Claude to build a harness that calls Codex on some schedule or interval.)
These all seem pretty good and I look forward to starting to use it once it's been more battle-tested.
[1] notably, on the Anthropic side the Opus 5 regressions - I had to downgrade to Opus 4.8 as I found Opus 5 was unreliable. I currently use Opus 4.8 and Codex Sol 5.6.
I'd love to see the stats on how many Linux users want this. Most Linux usage probably comes from WSL/SSH'ing into servers, where they would use the CLI instead of a GUI. Even for the people who run Linux on the desktop, most probably prefer the terminal anyways
While it may not be the majority of Linux usage, there’s a pretty big uptake in Linux desktop these days, and there millions of people actively using Linux desktop distros
It'd be nice for sending prompts from phone, although it is a whole lot of bloat for just that feature. Par for the course for the AI era, in order to do a thing first you must import the universe.
That was already supported from your phone by using SSH, using the app server feature of the Codex CLI. The Codex desktop app is more for computer use, browser control, and the UI paradigm of GUI, which is overall just richer and better than a TUI, albeit more heavyweight.
Do you have a link for those docs? I either missed that, or it seemed like a too complex feature.
One of the issues with this new trend of vibecoding a million features, is that the (vibecoded) docs are labrynths of new features, and features that are deprecated or redundant with 2 month younger features.
A real issue we have run into is that "computer use" features, which is absolutely a big no-no at our company, can be enabled with a single click, and we cannot configure that.
I think these styles of apps will be popular for OpenAI and Anthropic as they help solve some of their moat issues. The deeper you integrate someone's files into their app, the harder it will be to switch AIs
ok, but you know these things are marketed as super products; it's pretty easy for me to use a local model to scale up almost any project on github. Why would this be an effective moat beyond "I use codex too!!"
The permission prompts after asking it to touch only 3 files are more concerning to me than Electron itself. An agent that can expand its access scope that easily needs a much clearer capability boundary, especially on a desktop where the user’s files are the real sandbox.
As others have said, there's all sorts of things an HTML renderer can do better than terminal: proper (not hacked) image handling on both input and output, rendering graphical results, graphs, better code highlighting and diffs, interactive elements, etc. But one thing that strikes me as especially important: a proper accessibility story with magnification, screen reader, TTS etc.
All the stuff people are hacking into TUIs is honestly a bit silly, they're actually very inefficient for high fidelity UIs. Having worked in it and on it before while @ GOOG, the actual renderer in Chromium is an optimized thing of beauty. It really makes sense to leverage it. Appropriately.
But all of the above could (should) be done as a locally hosted web page via the existing codex CLI launching a local web server... rather than shipping an electron binary with its own entire fork of Chromium.
I am unable use non-CLI tools, so I don't care about this app. However, I have a question about codex CLI: currently I am using pi agent and I am happy with it, using codex CLI would give me some advantage?
Does this mean it is possible to talk to Codex from ChatGPT on a mobile phone now?
When I tried that with the Codex CLI version on a Linux VM, I did not get it to work. Possibly because OpenAI only supports connecting ChatGPT to a desktop installation of Codex?
I have a codex cli instance on a Debian VM connected to ChatGPT on iOS via SSH. That works since.. about a month and has pretty good UX. Before, I used the shellfish terminal and tmux which also worked really good, but to be honest (even though I'm a big terminal fan), ChatGPT on iOS sometimes has a smoother UX than a terminal.
Are you sure ChatGPT on IOS connects directly to the VM? Or via a desktop as the middle man sitting somewhere?
If you really only use ChatGPT on IOS and a VM and nothing else, then I would be curious how you set that up. I do not see a "connect to codex via ssh" in my ChatGPT app. I only see "Connect to a desktop".
Oh HOLY MOLY! Now I see there is not only a "Remote" section in the app but also a "Connection" section where you can add an ssh connection. I need to try that.
Also for future readers: Yes, I'm sure there's no desktop app in the middle. I have dedicated remote VMs that run agents. I don't have them running on the desktop, not even as a middle man.
Are there really daily driver Linux users that want to run a proprietary gui based LLM solution that Sam Altman gets to keylog AND have full remote code execution on their system? This feels like trolling.
Meanwhile I am looking at a Crush client running beside neovim in a herdr session I am accessing via ssh to a machine in my garage with 4 local GPUs. I think we Linux users have got this without Sams help.
Why not create a separate account on Linux just for the agent?
This security measure should also be enabled by default. Many packages REQUIRE the creation of an account, but agents do not. Interesting.
You can definitely do that, but it is your duty and it cannot be delegated.
Also these things are supposed to help you, their idea is that you give it access and it's helpful proportional to the access you give it. A separate user works for some, especially when vibecoding, you whitelist accesses. But for general computer usage, an assistant that has access to your files and acts as a sort of OS needs your user access.
I tried it yesterday. The experience seems smoother than on Windows. I hope Computer Use will be added soon.
Also, when will OpenAI fix the issue where Xhigh and Ultra are both translated as “极高” in Chinese? It’s been this way for quite some time. As far as I know, the proportion of Chinese employees at these Silicon Valley AI companies is quite high.
You have "send feedback" button in the app. Something tells me that it's much better place to report issues with the app rather than comment section on unrelated website.
I think their backend data probably shows that very few Chinese users are using Codex through the official way, and the number of those who have switched to the Chinese interface is even smaller, so there’s not much incentive to fix this issue.
Access to your computer is the entire point of the app. Codex computer use can script and control any application on your computer.
You can give it any task on your computer and it can automate it.
Such as creating a photo on Photoshop, creating 3D models, editing videos, or browsing any website without scripting.
Honestly, you're missing out. The productivity gains I've had with these tools is unbelievable. I understand the risk though, so if you've got government sensitive data on your computer, or no backups, don't use the "full access" option. Babysit what it does instead.
Depends how much you are using it - for a casual user the $20 tier gives you just about enough use for hobby projects etc.
Or if you are doing full time development then you just need to pony up for the 20x tier if you want to use it.
Running Codex locally removes so much friction and is so fast compared to either running it on the web (where it has to build environments online etc which consumes time) or compared to copy-pasting chatgpt that it's just a no-brainer.
I don't know about Chatgpt but I used Kimi (they have a Chinese-only plugin that does desktop control - works fine if you enable it even if you don't know Chinese). Observing how it works, it's mostly using the accessibility features of the user interfaces - it fetches a sort of DOM for the desktop applications. Only rarely it has to take a screenshot.
Literally everything from generic coding agent to shopping.
I run it in a MacOS vm, fwiw, for certain tasks. I usually hand it a repo and say “install all build dependencies” and it’ll click through installation GUIs where necessary. I wonder if the TOS of an application is enforceable if a bot agreed and a human never saw it.
It can UI test web apps if that’s part of your job, but it can also just use the browser for tasks. I’ve had it research flights by checking different dates automatically and compiling the results for me. I’ve heard others use it to handle building a shopping cart for instacart/grocery delivery.
Probably the hero usecase for most people would be app/web development. It can control either a browser or a device simulator and can iteratively build and test the application, by clicking real buttons.
I upgraded my workflow a few months ago from "copy-paste things in and out of ChatGPT" to "use an agent that edits my project files and runs tests on its own" and the ergonomics are just so much better and enables automating bigger tasks. I still monitor everything it does and do manual adjustments so I feel ownership of the code.
But isn't that use-case solved a harness like OpenCode or Codex? OpenClaw and Hermes are a bit different beast although they can also be used for development in a more holistic manner (e.g. automated GUI testing).
I'm just wondering about other uses where such a system would be useful aside from asking it via Signal or WA for the weather.
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.
> 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.
Well, with RAM being so cheap, why bother trying to trying to be memory efficient? It's not like OpenAI has an infinite pool of "AI" software engineers to work on this...
Oh wait...
Yeah, but if you use Qt like I did, you're shipping libstdc++, some other crap and Qt.
Yeah, I was kind of surprised recently that there's no solid native way to build desktop apps on Linux! I was thinking I'd build something actually native with AI but then the options were QT or or gtk...
You don't care what were you trying to build but for a quick me alone Linux app I used Flutter. Honestly it's my go-to when I want to have a quick native app on any platform but dont want to bundle electron.
Qt is as solid as it gets. It's very, very high quality. Much higher quality than Microsoft's frameworks on Windows.
Well what does native mean? An XWindow? Native on gnome is different from native on kde or xfce or lxde…
Microsoft used to ship a Linux binary for Teams, but they stopped doing that. Guess the tech was lost.
Yes, except it only worked some of the time on some of the distros (mainly Ubuntu/Debian variants of a certain vintage).
With the AI, we can finally have the year of desktop Linux.
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
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.
But they're strictly sandboxed and won't muck up my local filesystem.
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.
Works everywhere except Linux for a long time.
What better way to showcase their tools capabilities than to deliver apps that are native, efficient, and integrate well with the host system? By compromising with Electron and making mediocre, bloated software they are signaling that they just aren't there yet.
It would be like Ford buying Hondas for their company cars. It might save them money but it sends the wrong message.
Maybe they are drinking their own kool-aid, resulting in less then optimal choices and worse software for everyone and everything
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.
Its unmaintained and has glaring bugs (cant adjust thinking level) for a month now
Yup, this pisses me off so much. I now just go to the web app instead of using this broken app.
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.
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
well this just shows how good the AI is at programming
Corporate it is a scam pretending to be a job creation program to make sure people dont get funny ideas
How are you doing testing for desktop apps? any tool recommendation?
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
Unrelated to this Linux release but I've been using the new ChatGPT desktop app since I annoying updated on accident, and I haven't had that great of an experience.
I previously really enjoyed the Codex app. It was easy for me to understand and find what I needed. The conversation view provided the right amount of information without feeling too concise or full of jargon and the typographic hierarchy made it easy to skim. The project based workflow made sense for my needs.
Ever since they combined all ChatGPT into one app though it has become a mess. It's trying to do too much in one. The settings menu is especially bloated, and I find the UI to be too complicated for the simple questions I'm asking outside of development work. I would rather just use the web interface for general use at this point. They've also been updating much of the UI to follow the same patterns as Claude, and I've not been impressed with the Claude desktop app.
To me, they are taking multiple steps backwards. I hope they eventually find their way again.
Reminder to everyone, treat these as trojans. Run them isolated from the rest of your system.
Give it a full desktop in a VM if you want to, just not direct access to your system.
And that's not a joke, I made the mistake of installing this on my Windows machine just to test it out quickly last week.
It created 2 new users and then assigned new NTFS permissions for every single file under my user directory to them. This of course wrecked havoc, ssh refused to work, several applications refusing to start and a ton of permission errors. It did this without even a warning in the background and it also does not undo any of it when you uninstall it.
It took around 3 hours to fix it by updating ~10 million NTFS permissions for every single file under my user directory.
I've been using GPT through opencode for quite some time on linux. I have had a great time with getting it to help me through computer use and it has been a game changer for me.
For instance recently, media downloads on my NAS became quite a bit slower. I asked it to investigate and it quickly got back to me saying the issue was the ethernet link had been downgraded to 100Mbps from 1Gbps. It even went through journalctl to tell me when this had happened. To fix it I just had to plug an ethernet cable out and back in. Now this is the kind of thing, earlier I would have to spend an evening on. But given an open system like Linux, a well made safe model just makes it so much more accessible than having to RTFM for one off things I am sure to forget in a month.
I dont really let it run loose through my systems, and keep an eye on the thinking traces it puts out and the permissions it asks for. But now I dont have to slog through manuals and deal with gruff people on the internet. I can choose to do so after the fact, depending on how much free time and curiosity I have.
I would love to see your prompt(s) and how you managed to make it do this.
I’ve been using Codex in full access mode constantly for the past couple months on a Pro plan and I haven’t had a single incident like this. I’ve used it across macOS, Linux, and Windows as well, so my usage isn’t limited to a specific setup either.
I never sent any prompts to it, it did all of this during the installation. Here is one related GitHub issue I found for it https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/12343 Looks like they don't intend to change this.
Your earlier post is misleading, since "it" sounds like the model, not the installer. (of course if the latter was created by the former, its basically the same complaint, but I suspect what you are talking about was a deliberate design decision by a human)
The problem doesn't exist when granting codex full access. Codex makes you choose upon first launch to "Set up default sandbox" or to "Use non-admin sandbox". The default option creates two new users and messes with NTFS permissions.
> I’ve been using Codex in full access mode constantly for the past couple months on a Pro plan and I haven’t had a single incident like this. I’ve used it across macOS,
That is not how it works: the "but it works for me" is a logical fallacy.
Haven't you followed a bit all the posts about models, for example, escaping their environments?
The "but it works for me" is a random data point: an anecdote.
That there are people / companies where models ran wild and destroyed files / messed up projects is a fact.
When there are documented cases of stuff gone wrong, people must find ways to protect their data.
We literally see posts frontpage, daily, about AI sandboxing and we regularly see posts about AI escapes or AI SNAFUs.
And you come and post "show me your prompt, for it works on my machine"...
I'm taking the person you are replying to as being snarky. But, I believe OP is right, treat these with zero trust.
At that point I'd rather re-install the whole machine. Beats 3 hours of wrangling NTFS permissions and inheritance.
If you’re doing that anyway you might as well install a hypervisor and layer your OS on top. That way you can snapshot before your LLM with root fucks everything up again.
Sorry, what was the problem we were originally trying to solve again?
“Guys, guys, guys, can we take a step back here? What problem are we really trying to solve?”
https://medium.com/conquering-corporate-america/10-tricks-to...
Oh my god. That was not satire?
Living a meaningful life. My yak has too much hair though.
Was the prompt "fuck up my system, please." or how did you manage this? I've used Codex for ages without any of these kinds of issues.
It did it during the installation process.
Skill issue honestly
Not sure if that makes it better or worse.
Freaking wow.
With exception of VSCode, because I have no choice due to some plugins, or apps required by customer projects where I have no other option as well, nothing else based on Electron pollutes my computers.
You always have a choice to use/learn/make a different tool.
It’s a prison of your own making.
I’ve personally adopted a process where I structure my projects to ALWAYS keep credentials and sensitive information in a separate directory.
The working copy gets rsynced to and from a dedicated VM with whatever $HARNESS.
If I have to deliver in technology X, customer isn't going to be happy getting Y instead, and I am not making my life miserable to work with editors lacking the specific tools, or that are forbidden by customer IT to be installed on provided equipment.
If your hypothetical client as security measure ONLY permits VSCode on a dedicated box you’re obligated to work on and have no control over - then I pray for you.
And for your hypothetical client.
Especially as judging by your description they despite this allow any VSCode plugin to be installed alongside it.
> and I am not making my life miserable to work with editors lacking the specific tools
And that’s the self-imposed prison I was talking about, there’s always alternative tools. In my mind a specific tool is something like Ghidra.
I see you never worked in enterprise consulting with either laptops or cloud VMs managed by customer IT, and where elevated actions require either IT tickets, or elevation tools with description fields why the operation is required, with development done with specific team accounts.
> You always have a choice to use/learn/make a different tool.
Weak argument. People don't have infinite time. People just want tools they trust and that aren't enshitified.
Many official, high-quality language support plugins are only available for VSCode. For some languages, you have a “choice” to use another IDE in the same sense that you have a choice to do programming with a hex editor. Lean being an example, where every alternative is in its infancy.
They ship with their own sandboxing by default, and Codex specifically is open source.
I’d wait. Remember when Chromium downloaded and installed binary blobs.
Also in the news: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/expa...
> and Codex specifically is open source.
Since we now have three "Codex"es, I think it's worth specifying you're talking about codex-cli/tui. Codex the hosted version and Codex the GUI are both fully proprietary I think (besides the codex-cli/tui parts they use, I'm guessing mainly the app-server stuff).
This app is NOT open source
Is this the same thing that broke out of the sandbox and into HuggingFace?
Or we are just assuming that was a PR stunt, which it almost certainly was.
Either way, this shit isn’t getting near my system.
> Is this the same thing that broke out of the sandbox and into HuggingFace?
No.
> Or we are just assuming that was a PR stunt, which it almost certainly was.
It wasn't.
> Either way, this shit isn’t getting near my system.
Sounds about right.
if it is open source why no exist any fork? why I can remove openai model default from instalation?
How do I get it to fix my Bluetooth if I do that? If you've been AI-pilled, 2026 is the year of Linux desktop because instead of dicking around with config files, I can just tell AI to fix python.
> How do I get it to fix my Bluetooth if I do that?
Manual tool calls. I ask AI to give me all the necessary reconnaissance commands, then I run them myself on the host and paste the output on the terminal with the SSH connection into the guest virtual machine where the harness is running. The AI then either figures it out and gives me the answer or runs additional tool calls by me. Repeat until annoying task is done, interrupt if anything suspicious shows up at any point.
I haven't had bluetooth issues in years, but I did have an agent reverse engineer a smartphone app that was required for programming some BT headphones. Now I can push my desired runtime settings automatically to the headphones when they connect to my computer
So, yes, I would say agents are pretty good at working with Bluetooth on Linux
Recently I had some crashes on my system and claude correctly diagnosed it to a broken SATA cable on my hard drive. That was really practical
If you want to be security conscious don’t give it access to your system directly. Ask it to guide you through the information gathering part of the problem solving process and use your brain and judgment if it actually needs the information/data it’s attempting to access.
If you can’t make that judgement call because of lack of knowledge/familiarity it’s okay - spawn a new fresh chat, get up to speed on the topic first and then resume.
That way you accomplish three things: you learn something new, you fix your problem and you don’t let a Trojan do whatever the hell it wants to your box which among other thing contains all the browser sessions and cookies :)
pi.dev, local model, (RAG-ed) copy of archwiki. You are more able than you believe. Already now, no permission needed.
How is Hermes different in that regard?
Also note, that RAG and even vector search are more paths of the early days that didn't prove too valuable. Just let your agent search it directly and optionally create an index as a default entrypoint for common topics.
Fair points. Agreed.
They're talking about letting the agent access the bluetooth stuff, not about where to get information/knowledge from.
Literally the same security risk.
My bluetooth jusy works actually. By the way I use arch
Bluetooth is the one thing I had problems in the past on GNU/Linux, Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. Linux is the only mentioned platform where you could technically give Codex root and let it fix it :)
I guess OpenBSD is the only OS where I never had any problem with Bluetooth audio.
Use NixOS, only give your model access to the config in a git repo, zero access to the actual host machine.
That is also what I do now (both with NixOs and Guix Os), both for personal computers and for servers.
- I inspect the agent's changes, and only apply them - at once - if they are OK. So I have no half applied bad changes to my system, and I can catch critical mistakes before they are applied.
- I can roll back the changes by just doing a `git revert` and reapplying
- The agent cannot read secrets or unrelated data, just config.
- The agent gets the full configuration of all systems at once, without having to maintain parallel documentation (which can get out of sync) or rediscover each time from scratch (access my running systems, for example with `ssh root@server`).
- It's harder for the agent to miss some aspect of the configuration, because it's all in my dotfiles. If it's not there, it's nowhere
I just use a local model; its too dumb to hack into NSA just to fix my bluetooth.
I find it almost funny how hostile the response is when a company actually goes through the effort of supporting Linux. Apparently shipping the Linux version is only step one, you also need to pick the right framework, use the right packaging, consume the right amount of RAM, and preferably rewrite it natively.
HN comment quality took a nosedive recently, You can predict the comments just based on the story, almost all of them cynical and snarky remarks. It used to be a place to come and learn from technical experts.
The AI boosters have driven away all experts. They are either financially invested or mindless power users on the level of the proverbial MacOS fanboys.
Experts related to real programming topics are gone or silent. AI experts have never even been here in the first place. It is all about Electron apps, prompts, agents and other bullshit.
Spinning this as a generous Linux port misses the elephant in the room: This is spyware that drags your system down to the level of Windows.
A challenge of releasing tech on a platform of people that are picky about tech.
> I find it almost funny how hostile the response is when a company actually goes through the effort of supporting Linux.
How magnanimous: they make the effort to support the OS their entire company is based on? It's not just for training the model and hosting them: it's also to run them, where they constantly use Linux to do their thing.
Without Linux, there's no OpenAI.
So I take it the Linux community should be so grateful that OpenAI supports Linux, right?
It’s almost like we Linux users are opinionated about software. Weird. /s
This will make it much easier to trap people into installing it without any isolation just to their primary user account or even make it run with admin privileges by default.
With the recent security related events we already see that it seems to be wide spread practice that many operators avoid the hassle of isolating their agents.
It is just an incredible cultural experience to see how quick stupidity gets accepted as a behavioural default.
At least on Windows/Mac, a significant number of users of this app are non developers, and you should tame your expectations about them handling things like "isolation".
Even for developers working on Linux, you'll be surprised how many have never run a docker command in their life.
A proof that normies just can't handle security is that when OS X came to be, many Mac OS users used to ask how to disable the root/regular user dichotomy.
Or the long process to educate Windows users, and developers as well, to not run as Administrator.
The Linux version seems to use bubblewrap + seccomp for a "workspace sandbox" automatically, in addition to the auto mode and/or user approval.
A VM would be even better, but people could presumably run this in one if we manage to convince them of higher sandboxing in general ?
Bubblewrap gets a bit confused inside a Docker container. If anyone knows how to run Codex inside a Docker container on Linux without it constantly complaining about a broken bubblewrap, please tell.
> If anyone knows how to run Codex inside a Docker container on Linux without it constantly complaining about a broken bubblewrap, please tell.
Why would you even use bubblewrap once it's running in a container? I've been running Codex in a container since it was publicly available, not even sure what you'd use bubblewrap for when you already separated codex from the rest of your filesystem?
Doesn't it automatically use bwrap if it's installed (in the container in this case)?
Don't install bubblewrap? I didn't and use codex in docker.
The cli does that already with codex on linux
Why would they write this in electron instead of something closer to the metal I thought this is the whole point of AI.
Sitting at 2.2GB of combined resident RAM across 11 processes. I haven't done a single query yet.
But you might. And Codex is taking your threats seriously and stand prepared in case you breach protocol and start using your computer resources for your own nefarious purpose.
These apps stands as last defense between users and legitimate owners of compute resources that is electron and pals.
What's the benefit of working with this app, which eats insane amounts of memory, instead of Codex CLI?
Outside Linux, on Windows/Mac, plenty of non developers much prefer the "desktop UI" experience over CLI. Some can't work with CLIs at all.
Even with Linux, there are more people -- including many non software engineers -- that are installing Linux on their home computers and may be interested in this.
Bear in mind that HN users don't remotely resemble the general population, or even employees at a tech company -- there are lots of people in finance, business, legal etc who could potentially benefit from this.
I’m a developer, daily driving Linux, and prefer GUI apps. Would’ve used Sublime Text if clangd plugin worked. Hence stuck with Emacs. Open Code GUI sucks compared to their TUI though.
I prefer the CLI but the remote control with the phone app only works with the phone AFAIK, so that’s the only reason I use it.
i sometimes find myself using the desktop app on macos, but the CLI just clicks more with how i think and its more flexible too.
Can we instead replace them with LLM ? Surely it woudl be much easier
Latex rendering, inline images, inline browser showing what it's clicking on, being able to view a spreadsheet and then select a region to reference in the conversation, clickable links when it references a specific line number with mouse-over previews, interactive inline visualisations.
There's probably more I don't remember too. In my opinion TUI apps are just silly. You don't get any of the advantages of it being just plain text because it's all wrapped in funny Unicode characters and at the same time the GUI capabilities are hamstrung by being text on a grid.
With claude, the difference I noticed is that you can run their cloud enviroment from GUI app, as well as connect to remote machine. Sure, remote connection is nothing interesting, but I'm not aware if claude cli can work with cloud based enviroment. Also claude design is alvaliable on claude gui app. But all of these can be accessed with the browser as well, only the local machine access is something that browser version doesn't have. But for that you can use cli... Really mess of the tools they are shipping. Waiting (not) for Claude/Openai OS
I use it on my macbook. The computer use is pretty sweet.
It can be controlled from your phone once paired, and it lets you actually see agents that it orchestrates in the threads. Also if you use MCP Apps, it can integrate those into threads.
I'm only familiar with the Anthropic equivalent, but the cognitive load is different as opposed to necessarily better or worse. I have friends who prefer mousing around the UI.
Tabs for long-running often-compacted sessions is a difference I've noticed in emergent UX.
I use Claude Code CLI, Codex Cli. Both are really good, they don't eat memory like the GUI apps.
I use the CLI, too, but I enjoy watchinng people use the desktop apps. It seems like the desktop apps may be a little bit better suited for human-in-the-loop work. If you're already switching back and forth between a mouse, having an IDE running may make more sense.
The best feeling has to be in the CLI, in my oppinion. A low-stakes project where you can let ultracode runaway from you in the CLI is the most fun.
Adequate text editing is the main one for me.
I think you can connect your phone and talk to codex remotely, so you can run programming prompts while afk
You can do that with the Codex CLI/TUI as well.
does the app eat more money that codex cli? I mean is there a difference in cost in asking via the app something vs the cli?
Nobody should be installing or using AI apps. Your browser is as far as they should go.
Reminder that the macOS app went from "this is fairly well made" to "it downloads multiple gigabytes of random things and doesn't follow any design conventions nor standards"
The Linux app will fail the same tests.
The testimonials at the bottom are all from AI companies.
Linux users are kind of averse to trojans. You should call it Back Orifice For Linux. You don't even have to change the OpenAI logo!
so instead of using a browser, now i can use an app that is a browser. makes total sense
Does this mean it's a matter of time until I can deploy codex on my raspberry pi now?
Codex CLI should have been usable for a while now, and you could also sign in to your ChatGPT subscription using Opencode which runs perfectly fine on a Raspberry Pi.
I’ve got a long running chat in the Windows app that becomes completely unresponsive for minutes on end. Complete travesty.
From yesterday, with 26 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49264334
For someone who has not tried these desktop apps: what is the the advantage versus cli codex with some MPCs and multiple folders each one with their context files?
The same as an OS with a UI. Discoverability, fewer actions per activity, easier navigation, faster to learn/lower skill floor, etc. Some highlights:
1. Much better multi-agent orchestration. The app supervises many agents, with different project views and built-in git worktrees, so agents can work on isolated copies of the same repo. It's easy to jump between tasks and see changes. I recall OpenAI wrote that CLI was not designed around this style of work.
2. The app combines multiple terminals, file previews, PR-review workflows, SSH connections, an integrated browser, and page annotations. For front-end stuff, Codex can run the app in Codex for mockups/prototypes, then iterate inside the app. IMHO I think this is a much faster, more intuitive flow.
3. For long-running and recurring agent workflows, I think they're much easier to manage in the app. You get automations, review queues, persistent conversation context, future schedules, and auto resume for longer running tasks. E.g. CI failure summaries, issue triage, and release briefs.
You can do some of the above, to some degree, with varying levels of success in the CLI, but I think it's miles ahead in the app.
> The app supervises many agents, with different project views and built-in git worktrees, so agents can work on isolated copies of the same repo. It's easy to jump between tasks and see changes.
This is mostly true with Codex and Claude Code Desktop, but gets a bit trickier with 3rd party tools.
I tried out some others and both Paseo and Kepler felt a little bit clunky especially around sub-agents and workflows (even if they let me have both OpenCode and Claude Code with different providers in the same UI). And OpenCode is plain lovely in the terminal but sorta okay in the browser: compare its display of sub-agents to what Claude Code does, for example; their tabbed interface also feels a tad less pleasant than the vertical menu of projects + sessions that most others are settling on, not their old look with icon per project, that was worse. There's definitely ample room for better tooling, then again early IDEs were far worse, so hopefully ADEs will get more polish eventually!
Still, regardless of what you use and across how many providers, it's nice to have everything in a single familiar interface, if you need that.
You get GUI niceties: a nice presentation of the output like inline markdown rendering including tables and images in a nice font. Input supports drag & drop, and I can actually navigate the input field the way I am used to (pointing and clicking, using keyboard shortcuts to jump to beginning of words / sentences). Not sure what the most modern CLIs support, but for me just the ergonomics of a GUI text field alone are superior.
It's easier to use for most people. I don't think CLI and GUI programs target the same audience.
I'm not ready to try this yet, since after some recent experiences[1] I've decided not to be at the cutting edge of new tools and models for a few weeks or months.
However, from the screenshots and description, I expect that you would have these advantages:
- History. Currently, if you type into the CLI (TUI) your intention and requests are captured in some transcripts, but not in conversational turns. If you want the history of what you typed into the cli/tui you would have to datamine it from transcripts. By contrast, on the screenshots you can see it is a simple conversation that's saved and easy to return to.
- Multiplatform. As per the announcement "Use Codex across ChatGPT, your editor, and the terminal", meaning that you could open the ChatGPT app on your phone and continue to interact with this. While this might not matter to you if you exclusively code while sitting in front of your computer, still, it helps you be able to stay on top of things if you are on mobile.
- Background tasks and autonomous work. It says you can schedule it to do things in the background (issue triage, alert monitoring). At the moment, it would only do this if you've asked either codex or another agent to build a harness for it that does so. (i.e. you could ask Claude to build a harness that calls Codex on some schedule or interval.)
These all seem pretty good and I look forward to starting to use it once it's been more battle-tested.
[1] notably, on the Anthropic side the Opus 5 regressions - I had to downgrade to Opus 4.8 as I found Opus 5 was unreliable. I currently use Opus 4.8 and Codex Sol 5.6.
I wonder why operating systems aren't integrating with browsers more.
If gpt is so great as they say, why aren't they using their own operating system yet? They have all the resources they need to prove a point
Because it would be stupid to do so?
FYI; This link shows Codex based on your current OS. I get a norwegian landing page with a download link for Windows.
Same. I was quite confused. [This page](https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/app) offers the Linux download link if anyone is interested.
About the damn time. Couldn't they vibe code the Linux version using the same very tool from the day one?
I'd love to see the stats on how many Linux users want this. Most Linux usage probably comes from WSL/SSH'ing into servers, where they would use the CLI instead of a GUI. Even for the people who run Linux on the desktop, most probably prefer the terminal anyways
While it may not be the majority of Linux usage, there’s a pretty big uptake in Linux desktop these days, and there millions of people actively using Linux desktop distros
It'd be nice for sending prompts from phone, although it is a whole lot of bloat for just that feature. Par for the course for the AI era, in order to do a thing first you must import the universe.
That was already supported from your phone by using SSH, using the app server feature of the Codex CLI. The Codex desktop app is more for computer use, browser control, and the UI paradigm of GUI, which is overall just richer and better than a TUI, albeit more heavyweight.
Do you have a link for those docs? I either missed that, or it seemed like a too complex feature.
One of the issues with this new trend of vibecoding a million features, is that the (vibecoded) docs are labrynths of new features, and features that are deprecated or redundant with 2 month younger features.
Heads up: unlike Codex CLI, Codex Desktop is proprietary, and thus can't be audited for Claude Code style hidden anti-user behavior.
A real issue we have run into is that "computer use" features, which is absolutely a big no-no at our company, can be enabled with a single click, and we cannot configure that.
I think these styles of apps will be popular for OpenAI and Anthropic as they help solve some of their moat issues. The deeper you integrate someone's files into their app, the harder it will be to switch AIs
ok, but you know these things are marketed as super products; it's pretty easy for me to use a local model to scale up almost any project on github. Why would this be an effective moat beyond "I use codex too!!"
The permission prompts after asking it to touch only 3 files are more concerning to me than Electron itself. An agent that can expand its access scope that easily needs a much clearer capability boundary, especially on a desktop where the user’s files are the real sandbox.
Why would I use this over browser version or CLI
I prefer the CLI myself, but I could imagine:
- nicer diff rendering, and directly mentioning parts of a diff
- Latex rendering (pretty annoying in the CLI, you have to actively tell Codex it's running in a terminal and replace Latex syntax with UTF-8 glyphs)
Probably ecause OpenAI wants training data from PCs of people who are scared of CLIs as well
As others have said, there's all sorts of things an HTML renderer can do better than terminal: proper (not hacked) image handling on both input and output, rendering graphical results, graphs, better code highlighting and diffs, interactive elements, etc. But one thing that strikes me as especially important: a proper accessibility story with magnification, screen reader, TTS etc.
All the stuff people are hacking into TUIs is honestly a bit silly, they're actually very inefficient for high fidelity UIs. Having worked in it and on it before while @ GOOG, the actual renderer in Chromium is an optimized thing of beauty. It really makes sense to leverage it. Appropriately.
But all of the above could (should) be done as a locally hosted web page via the existing codex CLI launching a local web server... rather than shipping an electron binary with its own entire fork of Chromium.
I am unable use non-CLI tools, so I don't care about this app. However, I have a question about codex CLI: currently I am using pi agent and I am happy with it, using codex CLI would give me some advantage?
You're unable to use non CLI tools? How do you interact with the Internet then?
I don't consider the browser a tool.
Didn't you hear, it's the year of lynx
Does this mean it is possible to talk to Codex from ChatGPT on a mobile phone now?
When I tried that with the Codex CLI version on a Linux VM, I did not get it to work. Possibly because OpenAI only supports connecting ChatGPT to a desktop installation of Codex?
I have a codex cli instance on a Debian VM connected to ChatGPT on iOS via SSH. That works since.. about a month and has pretty good UX. Before, I used the shellfish terminal and tmux which also worked really good, but to be honest (even though I'm a big terminal fan), ChatGPT on iOS sometimes has a smoother UX than a terminal.
Are you sure ChatGPT on IOS connects directly to the VM? Or via a desktop as the middle man sitting somewhere?
If you really only use ChatGPT on IOS and a VM and nothing else, then I would be curious how you set that up. I do not see a "connect to codex via ssh" in my ChatGPT app. I only see "Connect to a desktop".
Oh HOLY MOLY! Now I see there is not only a "Remote" section in the app but also a "Connection" section where you can add an ssh connection. I need to try that.
Thanks!
You're welcome(;
Also for future readers: Yes, I'm sure there's no desktop app in the middle. I have dedicated remote VMs that run agents. I don't have them running on the desktop, not even as a middle man.
yes I use that exact feature constantly to use Codex on remote servers and it works great
Why is this written in electron?
It has a full web browser in it
Because apparently ChatGPT is not able to generate native apps, so desktop developers are safe. /s
Glad to see a .rpm, Claude only publishes a .deb.
More details here: https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/linux/linux-app
Not perfect but a good starting point
Download it a few hours ago. I've been waiting a long time for linux and it is working fine in debian kvm via X11
If you are using linux and cannot use a console to code...
Does this mean that ChatGPT Desktop will run now also on Intel Macs?
Much prefer CLI because its easier to isolate
Are there really daily driver Linux users that want to run a proprietary gui based LLM solution that Sam Altman gets to keylog AND have full remote code execution on their system? This feels like trolling.
Meanwhile I am looking at a Crush client running beside neovim in a herdr session I am accessing via ssh to a machine in my garage with 4 local GPUs. I think we Linux users have got this without Sams help.
This is how I get ChatGPT on Windows to not absolutely suck.
Can just install it in WSL now and it's got buttery smooth performance vs. the Windows version
I blame AV hooks
On Windows you definitely want to exclude your code directories from AV and use a dev drive
Why not create a separate account on Linux just for the agent? This security measure should also be enabled by default. Many packages REQUIRE the creation of an account, but agents do not. Interesting.
You can definitely do that, but it is your duty and it cannot be delegated.
Also these things are supposed to help you, their idea is that you give it access and it's helpful proportional to the access you give it. A separate user works for some, especially when vibecoding, you whitelist accesses. But for general computer usage, an assistant that has access to your files and acts as a sort of OS needs your user access.
Is there anything it can do that Codex CLI can't?
it can consume more of your RAM
oh Electron, leave my ram alone.
I tried it yesterday. The experience seems smoother than on Windows. I hope Computer Use will be added soon. Also, when will OpenAI fix the issue where Xhigh and Ultra are both translated as “极高” in Chinese? It’s been this way for quite some time. As far as I know, the proportion of Chinese employees at these Silicon Valley AI companies is quite high.
You have "send feedback" button in the app. Something tells me that it's much better place to report issues with the app rather than comment section on unrelated website.
I think their backend data probably shows that very few Chinese users are using Codex through the official way, and the number of those who have switched to the Chinese interface is even smaller, so there’s not much incentive to fix this issue.
I don’t think GPT-5.6 would make such a basic mistake when reviewing CodeX itself.
Because all Chinese users must use a VPN to access Codex.
If that’s an Electron app, what’s the difference with running it in the browser?
Access to your computer
That's why I won't download that tool.
Access to your computer is the entire point of the app. Codex computer use can script and control any application on your computer.
You can give it any task on your computer and it can automate it. Such as creating a photo on Photoshop, creating 3D models, editing videos, or browsing any website without scripting.
What about running it in a virtual machine?
Honestly, you're missing out. The productivity gains I've had with these tools is unbelievable. I understand the risk though, so if you've got government sensitive data on your computer, or no backups, don't use the "full access" option. Babysit what it does instead.
Isn't it expensive, though? If you let it perform gui or web tasks for you using vision, I'd think it consumes lots of tokens.
Depends how much you are using it - for a casual user the $20 tier gives you just about enough use for hobby projects etc.
Or if you are doing full time development then you just need to pony up for the 20x tier if you want to use it.
Running Codex locally removes so much friction and is so fast compared to either running it on the web (where it has to build environments online etc which consumes time) or compared to copy-pasting chatgpt that it's just a no-brainer.
I don't know about Chatgpt but I used Kimi (they have a Chinese-only plugin that does desktop control - works fine if you enable it even if you don't know Chinese). Observing how it works, it's mostly using the accessibility features of the user interfaces - it fetches a sort of DOM for the desktop applications. Only rarely it has to take a screenshot.
Can you give some examples? I'm evaluating where/how I could use stuff like this.
Literally everything from generic coding agent to shopping.
I run it in a MacOS vm, fwiw, for certain tasks. I usually hand it a repo and say “install all build dependencies” and it’ll click through installation GUIs where necessary. I wonder if the TOS of an application is enforceable if a bot agreed and a human never saw it.
It can UI test web apps if that’s part of your job, but it can also just use the browser for tasks. I’ve had it research flights by checking different dates automatically and compiling the results for me. I’ve heard others use it to handle building a shopping cart for instacart/grocery delivery.
Probably the hero usecase for most people would be app/web development. It can control either a browser or a device simulator and can iteratively build and test the application, by clicking real buttons.
> Literally everything from generic coding agent to shopping.
People need help with shopping now?
ooh, chatGPT is really good in filtering bullshit and recommending the products that really fit.
For serious stuff, is part of the shopping flow.
I upgraded my workflow a few months ago from "copy-paste things in and out of ChatGPT" to "use an agent that edits my project files and runs tests on its own" and the ergonomics are just so much better and enables automating bigger tasks. I still monitor everything it does and do manual adjustments so I feel ownership of the code.
But isn't that use-case solved a harness like OpenCode or Codex? OpenClaw and Hermes are a bit different beast although they can also be used for development in a more holistic manner (e.g. automated GUI testing).
I'm just wondering about other uses where such a system would be useful aside from asking it via Signal or WA for the weather.
Right. I'm also curious about those use cases. I don't want an AI clicking through my mailbox.
None that I can see - I already have it installed as a chrome app on my Mint desktop, and it seems identical.
Does the Chrome app have access to your local files, like when you're working on a code project?
Or running local commands or talking to an MCP server at a random domain unrestricted by content policy
Why do you need nodejs if you can run javascript in the browser?
Do people really use that? It seems horrible to turn your computer into a spydevice for AI slop spammers.
people good w/ linux would not have been holding their breath for companies which keep intelligence for a premium & h0st@ge depending on policy
Plague of AI slop.
A senior engineer in an Open Source project told me "I haven't looked at code in months"
In which case what TF is it you even do ?