claude-desktop-debian

I have been running Claude Desktop on Linux via the unofficial Debian build for months and it is solid. The unofficial repo at github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian works well for both Debian and RPM-based distros. That said, an official build would make a huge difference for enterprise adoption. Many companies have policies against unofficial packages, and the signing + update mechanism is always going to be more trustworthy when it comes from Anthropic directly. For anyone waiting: the unofficial build is perfectly usable for personal projects. But I would love to see Anthropic prioritize this -- the Linux developer community is exactly the audience that pushes Claude the hardest.

Hey! I manage the unofficial build at https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian Debian is in the name, but scope has grown to all backends, compositors, etc. The main reason must companies don't publish Linux electron apps is fragmentation. If you're doing anything more than rendering a webpage as an app, it starts to get complicated. I've got a bank of VM's setup for testing, and I still need it up.

YES! But also hmm, maybe not. I literally installed the unofficial build[0] a few hours ago, and when I started it and saw a bunch of Electron processes immediately trigger my spawn swarm detector, I just closed it. Don't think I'll ever touch it again. [0] https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian

He's probably talking about the desktop version, which afaik doesn't officially exist on Linux. There are Debian packages that repackage the electron code though: https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian

Windows (arm 64), but no official Linux (x86) support? There is only unofficial build: Claude Desktop for Debian-based Linux distributions https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian

That's great! Yesterday I stumbled upon the same concept for Claude Desktop and Linux [0]. I wonder why the companies themselves don't want to ship their Electron apps for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Spotify has a sensible approach: they ship the builds, although unsupported for Linux. Not ideal, but that's something. [1] [0]: https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian [1]: https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/

I am running this OK in Ubuntu 2404 : https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian Claude Desktop for Debian-based Linux distributions From Claude I have connected to these MCP servers OK : @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem, @executeautomation/playwright-mcp-server. I have connected to OP's extension (browsermcp.io) from vsCode (and clicked 1 tab button OK), but not from Claude desktop so far (I get Cannot find module 'node:path'; which is require-d in npm/lib/cli.js; tried node 18,20,22; some suggestions here : https://medium.com/@aleksej.gudkov/error-cannot-find-module-... ).

I have seen this repo on github, I don't really know a lot about Linux but could be interesting. https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian

This requires an MCP-compliant client, for which Claude Desktop seems to be the main (or only?) choice. Note that Claude Desktop can be run on Linux using https://github.com/aaddrick/claude-desktop-debian, which repackages the Windows version to run on Linux (it's an Electron app, so it just needs to stub out the native interface, which seems mostly for cosmetic things). It would be really nice though if the web versions of Claude, ChatGPT, etc. added MCP support directly: this should be achievable with help from a WebExtension and a native binary to proxy messages from the WebExtension to the MCP server. It should also be possible to write such a WebExtension by a third-party (that injects messages in the conversation), although it's possible the LLM companies might block it.