Hi all,
I have been curious about the newer Codex desktop app features, especially the more app-like workflow and computer-use style capabilities. They look useful for real desktop work, but as a Linux user it felt a bit unfortunate that the desktop app itself is not available here.
So I spent some time seeing how far I could get, and wrote up the result:
The short version: I managed to get the Codex desktop app launching locally on Ubuntu by using an unofficial wrapper around the upstream macOS app. This is very much a proof of concept, not something I would tell people to install on their daily driver yet.
A few things I wanted to be clear about:
- this is not an official OpenAI Linux release
- the repo does not redistribute Codex Desktop,
Codex.dmg, or any generated app bundle - Codex CLI is still the sane/supported way to use Codex on Linux
- I avoided native install, updater, service, and package-manager paths for now
What I did validate was fairly small but useful: the wrapper build completed, the generated Electron app launched, the local webview responded on 127.0.0.1:5175, and the Codex CLI app-server handshake worked on Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS / GNOME Wayland / x64.
The repo is mostly evidence and notes rather than a polished project: build metadata, smoke-test output, process evidence, a screenshot, known issue notes, and the remaining QA I still think needs doing.
My main motivation was not to make a polished installer, but to explore whether Linux users could eventually get closer to the same desktop workflow instead of being limited to the CLI path only. I would especially appreciate feedback on safer sandboxing/testing approaches, or anything obvious I should validate before taking the experiment further.