My main development machine runs Linux. For a long time the Claude desktop app didn’t.
There’s an official Linux build now, in beta, from Anthropic’s apt repository. The documentation is explicit about what you get: “Linux support for the Claude desktop app is in beta. The Chat, Cowork, and Code tabs are all available.”1
Installing it
Requirements are Ubuntu 22.04 or later, or Debian 12 or later, on x86_64 or arm64. Other Debian-based distributions that meet those requirements may work but aren’t officially tested.1
Add the signing key:
sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/claude-desktop-archive-keyring.asc https://downloads.claude.ai/claude-desktop/key.asc
Register the repository:
echo "deb [arch=amd64,arm64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/claude-desktop-archive-keyring.asc] https://downloads.claude.ai/claude-desktop/apt/stable stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/claude-desktop.list
Then install:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install claude-desktop
The docs publish the signing key fingerprint so you can verify it with gpg --show-keys before trusting the repository, which is worth doing.1
One thing to know afterward: the app doesn’t update itself on Linux. New versions arrive with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade like anything else on the system.1
Cowork itself needs a paid plan. The Help Center states it’s “available for paid plans (Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise).”2
That same Help Center page lists Cowork’s platforms as macOS, Windows, web, and mobile, and doesn’t mention Linux at all, while the product documentation says the Linux beta includes the Cowork tab.21 The two pages disagree as of this writing, and I’m going with the Linux page, since it’s the one describing the Linux build.
What the beta doesn’t have yet
The beta is missing four things, all documented:1
- Computer Use. App and screen control isn’t available on Linux.
- Dictation. Voice input is missing from the Linux app. The CLI has its own voice dictation.
- Quick Entry global hotkey. Works on X11. On native Wayland it needs your desktop environment’s GlobalShortcuts portal.
- Fedora and RHEL. Only Debian-based distributions are supported today.
What SSH sessions do, and don’t do
The desktop app can also connect to a remote machine over SSH, which is useful when the code lives on a cloud VM, a dev container, or a server with specific hardware or dependencies.3
It’s worth being precise about what that gets you, because the feature names invite confusion. The app has three tabs: Chat, Cowork, and Code. The SSH connection belongs to the Code tab, and the documentation describes it in one sentence: “SSH sessions let you run Claude Code on a remote machine while using the desktop app as your interface.”3
So an SSH connection runs Claude Code on the remote box. It doesn’t move Cowork there. Anthropic documents SSH only as an environment option for Code sessions, alongside local, cloud, and WSL, and the Cowork documentation doesn’t mention SSH anywhere. That’s an absence of documentation rather than a documented prohibition, but if you’re hoping to reach Cowork on a remote machine this way, nothing in the docs suggests it works.
Setting up an SSH session
Click the environment dropdown before starting a session and select + Add SSH connection. The dialog asks for four things:3
- Name. A label for the connection.
- SSH Host.
user@hostname, or a host defined in your~/.ssh/config. - SSH Port. Defaults to 22 when left empty, or takes the port from your SSH config.
- Identity File. Path to your private key. Leave it empty to use the default key or your SSH config.
Four details the docs mention that are easy to miss:3
- The remote machine must run Linux or macOS.
- The desktop app installs Claude Code on the remote machine automatically the first time you connect. You don’t install it yourself.
- Once connected, SSH sessions support permission modes, connectors, plugins, and MCP servers.
- Personal skills load from the remote host’s
~/.claude/skills/, not from your machine. If you keep custom skills locally, they won’t be there.
Session history is per surface. The desktop app and the CLI read the same configuration and share project memory through CLAUDE.md files, but each keeps its own session list.3 Don’t expect to start something in the desktop app and pick it up from the terminal.
Which one you want
If your development machine runs Ubuntu or Debian, install the Linux app. You get all three tabs on the machine your files are already on.
If your code lives somewhere else, SSH sessions are the right tool for reaching it, as long as what you need there is Claude Code.
