OpenAI launches a ChatGPT desktop app for Linux

OpenAI has launched a dedicated ChatGPT app for Linux, released in preview this week, closing the last major platform gap in its desktop lineup. The app gives Linux users access to ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex, OpenAI’s coding tool, across a number of different distributions, with the release going out worldwide as of Tuesday.

Linux had been one of the most requested platforms for the desktop app, particularly among open-source developers who had pushed OpenAI to bring its chatbot to their part of the ecosystem. “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,” OpenAI said in a statement on Tuesday.

For this preview, OpenAI said it supports desktop variants of Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04 LTS, Debian 13, and Fedora 43 and 44. The Linux community as a whole spans hundreds of distributions, but the four OpenAI picked serve as the base for numerous downstream “flavors,” which OpenAI said should also be compatible with its apps as a result.

The launch puts OpenAI a step behind rival Anthropic, which released a Claude desktop app for Linux about a month earlier. Anthropic’s version supports Ubuntu 22.04 and later, along with Debian 12 and later — coverage that reaches further back than OpenAI’s initial preview.

Why it matters

A native Linux client signals that OpenAI now treats the open-source developer community as a mainstream distribution channel for ChatGPT and Codex, not an afterthought — a base that skews toward the engineers who decide which AI coding tools get adopted inside their companies.