Interesting to see the Linux version released. On Windows, though, my experience with the new ChatGPT app since Codex was folded into it hasn't been great.
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.
I've been using it to vibe code a personal application while I'm using a more "powerful" setup for my main agent assisted coding, and I have to say that it's been very good so far. I just wished that it was easier to hand off some tasks to codex web, like I tried to do today as I was starting a boat trip.
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"
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.
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.
My biggest gripe is now anytime I open a new session it hangs and I see the beachball spinner (mac) for a while before I can actually use the app again. It's pretty brutal.
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?
"Codex could not find bubblewrap on PATH. Install bubblewrap with your OS package manager. See the sandbox prerequisites: ... Codex will use the bundled bubblewrap in the meantime."
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?
You have to add Linux capabilities to support creating nested namespaces. IIRC SYS_ADMIN is required. If you do that, what do you think you’re achieving with the container? It defeats the entire purpose IMO, just makes development more inconvenient.
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.
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...
Well yes, I was surprised by the situation in Windows too! So my stack is now split like this
- 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.
Indeed! I wrote my note-taking app with a block editor (like Notion) in Qt with QML for the UI and C++ for the logic and it's been an incredible experience![1]
How would you know? It's impossible to have done a thorough analysis of all the Windows UI frameworks, five have been released since I started typing...
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.
Flutter is solid choice, and Canonical seems to be putting weight behind it for Ubuntu as well. Canonical is also now the new lead maintainer of Flutter Desktop.
QT and GTK are as native (and solid, I guess) as it gets, since there's no "default" UI toolkit that's shipped along with the kernel, unlike e.g. Windows or macOS. Speaking of Windows, why do they even ship browser-UI apps as a part of the OS? Do they find native Windows UI development too hard or feature-limited even with LLM assistance?
Because Microsoft screwed up their native UI story. They are slowly starting to go native again with WinUI3, but Microsoft went through a rough period with UI frameworks, I mean how many do they have now all still "supported"? WinForms, WPF, MFC, WinUI, MAUI, etc.?
I mean there is the no true linux argument, but covering the main stream desktops you basically have kde which is written with qt(so qt is native) or gnome which is written with gtk and both frameworks/DEs do implement other things besides "just" the gui, so you are native.
I'm not usually one to defend Microsoft, but since Teams works great in a browser, I actually prefer it that way. My video conference doesn't need access to my whole filesystem and an opacity layer that prevents me from seeing what it does. I actually applaud them for supporting browsers as well as they do.
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…
> App was released in February & took 6 entire months to port to Linux
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yeah that's what gets me. If, according to them, "software development is a solved problem" then there's no reason they can't make native, efficient, well integrated apps for each platform. If the problem is solved, just have the AI do it! If it's truly as advanced and accelerating as they claim, then there's no need for electron anymore.
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?
They probably just don't see it worth the extra effort. And maybe they want to keep it in sync with the web UI.
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.
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.
The desktop app is actually really good (esp on macos). I used to be CLI only, but after trying it recently it's super convenient. Much easier to manage multiple projects simultaneously and it has a built in diff viewer, file browser/reader, terminal, side chat interface, etc.
The most remarkable thing is that it was built at all. What self-respecting Linux desktop user wouldn’t be satisfied with the TUI?
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.
Is this a linux issue? My Macbook has 16gb ram and running out has literally never been an issue for me. I'm using all of it + 10gb of swap and my computer feels snappy and fast. Chrome with 100+ tabs, discord, slack, codex, chatgpt, all running simultaneously with no issues. Sure, all other things being equal less RAM usage is better, but I can understand why reducing it isn't a priority for them.
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.
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.
We live in an era where companies are increasingly hostile towards their users and society at large. Where regulation has been stripped or ignored to maximize the profits of a handful of monopolies, where companies don‘t even have to pretend to care about their customers anymore, nor the usability of their product. Seemingly companies don‘t even bother to test their products anymore before selling it to their customers. And companies that engage in the most consumer hostile behavior are the ones who are most rewarded for that behavior.
I think this cynicism is more then warranted. If anything HN is not cynical enough to meet the times we are in.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
"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).
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.
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.
Oh, I thought you were telling me because you actually did it, not because you read it could be done.
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
On macOS, the version made for Apple Silicon in Swift was abandoned (now it called ChatGPT-classic until they decide to kill it) to this garbage in Electron.
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!!"
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 made something similar using Tauri but there were visual inconsistencies between platforms thanks to webkit. At the time I remember thinking I wish I had used electron to buy cross platform parity.
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.
Because electron gets shit done? Aside the memory usage, electron/browser based applications of any complexity tend to be better and develop a lot faster.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An often overlooked advantage of Electron based apps is they can convert any older version of laptop into a nice toaster oven.
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.
Everybody is irritated about electron, but that's not at all the problem. It's possible to write performant and optimized react code. They simply don't. I find the chatgpt app on Windows to be extremely laggy.
Electron is just another god damn GUI toolkit! What's the fundamental difference between it and, say, GTK4? It's just fucking widgets!
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.
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.
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.
I don't think its asking too much of a $1T company to not make a shitty desktop app. Especially when that companies whole moat with developers is that their tools can do our jobs better and faster.
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.
OpenAI: With AI, you can build really good apps, really quickly! Fire your devs!
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)
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.
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.
I can't answer that question, but I think you can do more with node than with default javascript, such as access to local files. This is something I wanted javascript to do for local use and people always said "you may not do this, your computer will be destroyed". So I just use ruby instead and am still annoyed that javascript is so crippled by default at all times.
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.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/nQkneGL
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 ?
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?
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?
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.
- 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
Though as someone who shipped commercial software on Linux, it wasn't that bad, you just had to ship everything other than the kernel.
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...
- 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.
[1] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor
Download Edge for Linux and use the PWA. It's still crap but at least it kind of works mostly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
HR is charmed by them despite their lack of discipline.
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.
Give it a full desktop in a VM if you want to, just not direct access to your system.
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.
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"...
https://medium.com/conquering-corporate-america/10-tricks-to...
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.
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.
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.
I would rather live in a shopping cart tent under a bridge.
Weak argument. People don't have infinite time. People just want tools they trust and that aren't enshitified.
In fact, VSCode’s support for Lean is via LSP anyways.
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 :)
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.
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 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
Also in the news: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/expa...
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.
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.
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
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.
https://openai.com/index/building-chatgpt-atlas/
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!
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.
- 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tabs for long-running often-compacted sessions is a difference I've noticed in emergent UX.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Can just install it in WSL now and it's got buttery smooth performance vs. the Windows version
I blame AV hooks
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.
People need help with shopping now?
For serious stuff, is part of the shopping flow.
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.
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 ?