news.ycombinator.com

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lucideer · 0 points · 0 comments · yesterday

The most remarkable things about this announcement: - Electron based app: Electron is a framework sold on the basis of enabling rapid cross-platform development at the cost of performance. - Frontier AI company: AI is sold on the basis of enabling rapid development - App was released in February & took 6 entire months to port to Linux

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SyneRyder23 hours ago

I guess it's easier to solve Erdos problems and improve the lower bound of the Riemann hypothesis, than it is to solve Linux desktop app distribution.

darkwateryesterday

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?

randusername21 hours ago

I was under the impression electron is chosen less because of broad cross-platform concerns and more because chat apps, specifically, require a level of care in text rendering that nobody really wants to design from first principles when they can just piggy back on web technologies. But I wouldn't know first-hand.

mitchchn16 hours ago

> 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.

yokoprime23 hours ago

Wonder how many will bother using the desktop version on linux. Im on macos and i just use the CLI most of the time