Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview(community.openai.com) |
Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview(community.openai.com) |
Can just install it in WSL now and it's got buttery smooth performance vs. the Windows version
I blame AV hooks
Codex messing around with the usage limits so much these past few months have convinced me to exit my $200/month burden and pick up Pi Coding Agent and Deepseek V4 Flash 0731.
It's incredible what you can do with subagents that you design yourself.
Liberating, really.
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 ?
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?
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!
My real problem with Electron is the multi-process render architecture, which I think is pointless for the "just a GUI toolkit" case of rendering only trusted content. I'm 100% fine with Slack, Spotify, whatever using Electron as their choice of GUI toolkits. These come and go. I'm miffed that they use multiple processes when there's no real security boundary between them just because there is a security boundary in the homologous scenario on the web.
And I experimented with gpui from zed, that was even harder to work with.
Of course they could chase performance, but ultimately time to market is the #1 factor right now, and coding agents still aren't good enough to just immediately realize an entire GPUI app from scratch with nothing more than a figma design. Still requires a ton of oversight.
Why do you care? If I chose platform X over Z, that is potentially because I like the visual particularities of this platform.
Seems pretty solid for Mac, but idk about Windows and Linux.
Also OpenAI: Aight look, Electron is the best that we can do at this point, take it or leave it.
If this isn’t enough to convince you how little truth there is in everything these companies claim, then you have been brainwashed entirely already.
Why aren’t we getting quality native apps on all platforms, released simultaneously, if these AI code monkeys are THAT good? Where are all these amazing experiences built with AI that these guys keep promising?
I guess an Electron monstrosity is about as far as it can go.
Learn from this, internet. (I know none of you will, but doesn’t hurt to call a bit of attention to it)
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.
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.
The real reason they're using Electron is that some PM is comfortable with it and since nobody is reading the code, they use that comfort as a crutch to release most-likely working desktop app.
When the creator of a project has infinite money, infinite labor, and infinite incentive to lock more devs into their platform via skill atrophy and the product is still shit, that's the human in the loop.
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.
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.
Tabs for long-running often-compacted sessions is a difference I've noticed in emergent UX.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'm just wondering about other uses where such a system would be useful aside from asking it via Signal or WA for the weather.
People need help with shopping now?
“Needs help” is an unnecessary and negative framing, don’t be a hater. We can basically always do what AI does (if not computers at large!), but either it’ll take longer or be boring.
With AI you can automate checking way more price comparisons than manually, with way less effort. With AI you can automate routine shopping tasks like converting a shopping list into an online shopping cart. I can search for specific products across dozens of sites manually, or I can ask AI to find it for me.
For serious stuff, is part of the shopping flow.
I'm a Codex user, and when it was still a standalone app it worked really well for me. Since it became part of the new ChatGPT app, the app feels noticeably slower and, at least on my machine, is currently using around 1.27 GB of RAM [1].
The old ChatGPT app, which has now been renamed "ChatGPT Classic", feels much faster and is using around 478 MB under the same conditions.
I have a reasonably powerful PC, so the difference is pretty noticeable. I assume Classic will eventually be discontinued, but so far the transition to the new app on Windows hasn't been particularly good for me.
That's definitely better, but all things considered, this is still an absurd amount of memory for a text chat client, even if you account things like hardware composited high-definition UI surfaces etc. into it.
The old app also had a habit of spinning at least one CPU core at 100% due to some runaway "shimmer" animation when an image wouldn't load or something...
> my experience with the new ChatGPT app since Codex was folded into it hasn't been great.
My main gripe beyond the performance issues is that OpenAI doesn't yet seem to know where they want to go with Codex and "ChatGPT Work", and is changing the paradigms daily, making it feel like there's no point in even trying to understand them.
It's really unclear to me which conversations (and lately scheduled tasks) are local and which are cloud-based.
However it’s still a an agent app, it gets the job done and has great tooling.
Eventually the whole thing will probably be remade in a more performant way and be announced in a blog post as one shotted by gpt 6.x
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.
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.
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.
The bad part of the setup is: you still have to tell it to ssh into your dev container and make changes there (since that's where the linux running dev server is). Most work still via cli, which is faster and much more lightweight in token usage.
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.
Even for developers working on Linux, you'll be surprised how many have never run a docker command in their life.
Or the long process to educate Windows users, and developers as well, to not run as Administrator.
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 ?
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!
- 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
Give it a full desktop in a VM if you want to, just not direct access to your system.
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 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.
Surely they can just vibe is down to a reasonable footprint, right? Right?
These apps stands as last defense between users and legitimate owners of compute resources that is electron and pals.
This is fantastic as I can toast or reheat my frozen waffles on the same machine which is also running a agentic loop on codex desktop to cook my software.
https://community.openai.com/t/codex-in-chatgpt-desktop-app-...
"The desktop app is designed as a workspace for managing projects, working with files, using browser workflows, and running Codex alongside ChatGPT."
Not sure if I really understand this. And somehow I am worried about ChatGPT having access to my files and workflows. How much control do I have?
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.
- 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)
Though as someone who shipped commercial software on Linux, it wasn't that bad, you just had to ship everything other than the kernel.
Don't they have agent swarms with infinite tokens?
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.
It definitely is a fraction of the work these days to maintain three different desktop apps + two different mobile apps + a web app. But it's still a lot more work than an Electron app that is merely tweaked between platforms.
But I wouldn't know first-hand.
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.
Product releases at large companies are slowed dow by coordination and resources more than actual development. (I'm an Electron maintainer who is currently working on better Linux support in the framework, and also a developer/PM for a commercial app that supports Linux.)
It's very likely that the Codex Electron app already "worked" on Linux back in February, as in someone internally could build and run it from source and start a chat session. That fact would have made it possible for a small team to make a business case and start getting support from ops, QA, CS, marketing, legal, etc. The engineers would spend their unlimited tokens on Linux-specific build, packaging, and platform integrations (remember this is a computer use agent) to take the app from a prototype to something a company could actually launch and support for millions of users.
Apps are also a moving target. The entire time building up to release, the Linux desktop app would have been getting feature and design updates for free from the updates going out on Mac/Windows/web. None of those other teams working on those features have have had the time (or the mandate) to coordinate with Linux engineers if they were building a separate app from scratch, and I suspect such a proposal would never have gotten off the ground.
I think you've summarised it really well, & it shows:
- the revolutionary promises of AI-driven rapid delivery is nonsense when the delivery bottleneck was always elsewhere - AI is speeding up the part that was never slow
- the fact that - as you point out - it was likely working in Feb but needed a business case gives a good impression of the leadership's approach to Linux support: it's likely such internal case-making will continue to be a factor in future Linux build maintained
What's remarkable is that it clearly wasn't a priority, which not only sends a clear message to Linux users, but also highlights that their platform choice is questionable if the leading selling point of said platform is something they don't see as an up front priority.
Though of course the third option is that it wasn't an explicit low priority but rather they're simply in disarray organisationally.
It is a marketing expense. We are talking about it. Surely the token cost was worthwhile on that basis alone. Students will likely get some usage out of it, too. But paying a human to do this port would have been an insane thing to do two years ago. I’d be surprised if they have more than 1000 MAUs for this client by the end of the year.
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 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.
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.
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.
Also in the news: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/expa...
"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).
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.
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.
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 :)
I guess OpenBSD is the only OS where I never had any problem with Bluetooth audio.
So, yes, I would say agents are pretty good at working with Bluetooth on Linux
I think this cynicism is more then warranted. If anything HN is not cynical enough to meet the times we are in.
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.
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?
They use Linux because it's there. If Linux wasn't there, they'd use what's there. There is nothing about Linux that makes it unique enough to be make or break OpenAI. Not one thing.
And yes, when a company distributes their app for the Linux desktop, we should be grateful or at the very least not hostile.
The attitude of Linux zealots is honestly tiresome and it makes us all look bad.
HR is charmed by them despite their lack of discipline.
- 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
And we should be "grateful"?
The corporate fascism here becomes scary. People here would work for IG Farben and discuss how to disrupt Zyklon-B and make it more efficient.
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.
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?
If you need the sandboxing capabilities provided by the application and don’t want to run it on the host, you should set up a VM, not a container.
From a systems perspective, it’s foolish to rely on a proprietary application to provide its own isolation guarantees. This is an OS-layer responsibility.
ML/AI experts suffer badly from hubris. They are brilliant in one domain. It transfers poorly to systems engineering. The proof is in the FelonyBench results.
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.
But I can’t tell from these docs if the ChatGPT desktop app needs to remain running on your macOS/Windows host as a proxy, or if you can directly SSH from your phone to your Linux box with just Codex CLI.
When I tried it a couple of months ago, the CLI version didn't have that feature, it's only present on the desktop app. The docs you linked seem to confirm this:
>In the ChatGPT mobile app, open Remote to work with ChatGPT or Codex chats on a connected Mac or Windows device.
>Start in the ChatGPT desktop app on the host you want to connect.
>Open the ChatGPT desktop app on the host. Go to Settings > Connections > Control this Mac or PC,
Then there's the SSH thing
>Use an SSH host or managed remote development environment when the project already lives in a remote environment. Connect the desktop app host to that environment first;
>For SSH setup details, see connect to an SSH host.
At this point I feel that I need to combine it with other experimental vibecoded features? And the end result would be something that I can hack together with some ddns reverse polling thing. I know I can download an ssh terminal to my phone and connect to my computer by either opening a port, or doing some wacky network stuff. I don't see the value add in doing that by adding the commands I would have to run to some openai config file yaml like
> ssh-tunnel: tailscale > port: 8411
instead of making a bash script with
> tailscale -p 8411
tl;dr: The feature is desktop app dependent, and the desktop app is now on linux, rejoice
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"...
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.
> It wasn't.
Prove it. But you can’t, which is problematic for you.
Nobody should believe anything OpenAI says about anything. They either lied about it breaking out of a sand box, or they’re incompetent by building a sandbox their AI could break out of.
It’s a cute story, though.
More honestly: "Convince me. Except I've already made up my mind, so I'll never let you."
And like yeah, that does seem to be the case, so that's a bit rough indeed.
That said, if you feel like being a bit intellectually daring tonight, here you go: https://youtu.be/87DyyMV0kCY
> Nobody should believe anything OpenAI says about anything.
It's a great thing you bring up beliefs: it's the only thing people ever have, both you and me.
Personally, after hearing their account (linked above), I don't find much to disbelieve on it. It's just a series of "oh okay, that's fun, makes sense" moments. It's normal stuff. They're definitely at least a little proud of having popped a few shops, but that's very realistic in its own way.
I guess your best next option is waiting for a lawsuit to reach discovery or something, and then it's a matter of how dedicated you are to your disbelief. This indeed hasn't happened yet though, if it ever will, so nothing for me to provide (nor for you).
Speaking of, note that I don't have any more reason to believe the likes of you than I do OpenAI. Especially because it all just comes across as trite cynicism, mixed with generous amounts of wishful thinking. I also happen to be simply using these things, so that further plays into why I don't find these events particularly miraculous. It's already existing capability for the most part, so why would I? The only difference is disabled guardrails and better temporal coherence, which is exactly what you'd expect from upcoming models still in eval.
> or they’re incompetent by building a sandbox their AI could break out of.
One could definitely make the argument that someone was at least a little asleep at the wheel, but I don't think that makes them particularly incompetent. Just the normal variety you'll find anywhere else.
https://medium.com/conquering-corporate-america/10-tricks-to...
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...
Download Edge for Linux and use the PWA. It's still crap but at least it kind of works mostly.
Keeps breaking in strange ways, though. Just like it always has. For example, it will randomly switch to light mode and the only way to recover dark mode is by selecting dark mode (which doesn't change anything) and then restarting. Restarting alone also doesn't do anything, mind you.
So the best part for me is I don’t have to prove anything. I’m not the one claiming it happened.
The onus is on them. Clearly HF did get hacked, but there is no unbiased evidence that this thing broke out of a sandbox unbeknownst to OAI, except OAI saying so.
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.
In fact, VSCode’s support for Lean is via LSP anyways.
Weak argument. People don't have infinite time. People just want tools they trust and that aren't enshitified.
I think neither the bundled bubblewrap nor the Ubuntu 24.04 bubblewrap works properly under Docker with the default options ... Yes, I've just tested that by asking Codex to "Test that bubblewrap is working properly" and then "Test again" after apt-get install bubblewrap.
EDIT: So the solution is to run "codex --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox" in a Docker container?
Does it break anything? I didn't notice, I always run codex in "yolo" mode (the whole purpose of running it in docker).
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.
They can be amazing. But you can write shitty code in them like anywhere else.
AIUI the reason is, "we", collectively even though we don't all work on them, optimize browsers for speed above almost all else. Then, when all the advertising websites on the internet consume all that speed, we can't go back and have to optimized for speed even harder. All that optimizing for speed ends up consuming lots of RAM, from all the images, the speed-optimize DOM with lots of cross-linking, the JIT and its generation of native code paths, the endless layers of caches, etc. etc. at every point where a browser can choose between RAM and speed it will choose speed unless it's just impossible to choose it for some reason.
So even if you write good code in Electron, it still tends to eat resources like candy.
On the plus side, if you write good code, you will pick up all those optimizations too, which is not necessarily all bad. Running something like VSCode at all is a powerful testament to the browser ecosystem now. IDEs do a lot of very heavy duty lifting and need a lot of performance to do all their work. But you can imagine that when the same text rendering system that enables all that fancy & fast syntax highlighting and all the other decorations and features in the editor window is used to display a preview of a markdown file that said preview is probably going to eat way more RAM than your instincts may have guessed.
Sectors involved in, in no particular order: government, financial, telecom, energy (gas and electric), manufacturing (large european conglomerates), healthcare, logistics
In fact I was the one usually helping IT Teams put the torture devices and policies you’re subjected to in place lol.
Banks would usually give us laptops with smart card readers and only allowed access to their VPN from a limited set of public IP addresses.
Govt was a bit more lax, but same principles applied, was really fun doing any kind of work over a laggy VNC.
My favourite one was probably where you’d have to hop from one Azure cloud VM, to Citrix to a bastion windows box, off of which you’d RDP to the actual work VM only to putty to the actual damn Linux box you cared about.
Energy sector was more lax, they let us set up a GitLab instance and a small CICD setup to which we’d push the code developed on our local boxes.
Oh and the ones I mentioned - they usually ask us what tools we wanted on our boxes as well.
- Apple: SwiftUI/AppKit
- Android: Jetpack
- Windows + Linux: Avalonia (C#)
Avalonia seems good so far. I couldn't do Qt because I can't deal with that qBittorrent look. GTK is aesthetically pleasing for me, but it only runs on Linux. Avalonia lets me target both of these UI-toolkit-less platforms with something native-ish. Flutter is probably good too, but I am using uniffi-rs and that doesn't generate Dart bindings AFAIK.
Would love to hear other options.