// ZDNET — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
I tried the new ChatGPT Desktop App for Linux - but I'll stick to my browser for now
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OpenAI has released a preview of its ChatGPT desktop application for Linux. With this, OpenAI now has a native client on all major desktop operating systems and is placing its coding agent, Codex, alongside ChatGPT and its Work environment.
That's the good news. The bad news is that, for me at least, ChatGPT continues to be annoyingly inaccurate. While I can cosplay a coder, with or without AI, my real use for AI is as an advanced search engine. When I asked the ChatGPT app on my main Linux Mint desktop to give me the technical specifications for SpaceX and Nvidia's forthcoming Starmind AI datacenter satellites -- and provided it with a link to the satellite's site -- I expected an accurate answer. I didn't get one. Starmind's height and wing-width, according to SpaceX, are 30m and 75m, respectively; not, as ChatGPT would have it, 20m and 70m.
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(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Leaving aside ChatGPT's lack of accuracy, this release supports Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 26.04 LTS, Debian 13, and Fedora 43 and 44 on both x86-64 and Arm64 machines. OpenAI is distributing the client as DEB and RPM packages. In practice, this means you can run on most Debian and Red Hat-family Linux distributions, such as my own Linux Mint.
The release also arrives roughly a month after Anthropic introduced a Linux desktop version of Claude. Anthropic's client supports Ubuntu 22.04 or later and Debian 12 or later, giving it a somewhat broader stated baseline among Debian-derived systems.
Also: I tested the new Claude Desktop on Linux - here's how it compares to rival apps
Arch Linux, NixOS, and other distros are left in the lurch for now. That's made some would-be users very unhappy. Others want the program to be distributed in Flatpak or AppImage formats.
Still, according to OpenAI, since "Linux has been one of the most-requested platforms for the desktop app, and this launch extends ChatGPT and Codex across every major desktop operating system," I imagine we'll see other distros supported soon.