Claude Desktop

Long-term owners

If you gave somebody the claude desktop app with blender mcp 10 years ago their minds would be absolutely blown.

Oct 2026 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• ClaudeRecommended for debugging from logs, implementing tricky algorithms and performance tuning, but it makes mistakes on large codebase changes and needs close supervision.5175recommend
• Google GeminiRecommended for everyday questions, image and handwriting understanding, and coding or scripting help, but many report confidently invented facts and dislike it being pushed into every Google product.2195recommend
• ChatGPTA general-purpose chatbot that people use to research faster, understand health issues, learn topics and draft writing, though it often hallucinates and tells you what you want to hear.2186recommend
• GrokRecommended for fast, concise answers, real-time current events through X, and useful second opinions on code, but critics widely cite Musk-driven political bias and weak safety guardrails.727recommend
• Microsoft CopilotValued for tight Microsoft 365 integration that finds work documents while respecting access permissions; critics dislike Copilot buttons pushed everywhere, confusing branding and made-up links.139recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 301 comments. Each links to the original.

1. The Desktop interface also presents Markdown as formatted text and presents artifacts (especially interactive ones) better than the CLI can.

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux”

2. There's no Plugin/Skill/Connector marketplace that is accessible from within the app, like there is with Claude Desktop.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Claude: Elevated errors across many models”

3. Our entire org migrated from random ChatGPT accounts to all Claude Desktop specifically targetting business users.

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Tag”

4. artifacts in the Claude desktop client, are super for helpful for bootstrapping/refreshing my mental model

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “How the Claude Code team does code review”

5. Connect it to Confluence, Jira, and Outlook, and it'll tell you what your top priorities are for the day

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “GPT-5.4 Thinking System Card”

6. It works so much better to find information from Confluence and present it to me in a digestible format

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?”

7. This allows the non-engineers (and also engineers) to use Claude Desktop to do day-to-day operations

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “I Still Prefer MCP over Skills”

8. Anthropic offers a desktop app with plugins that easily extend the data Claude has access to.

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “GPT-5.4 Thinking System Card”

9. it works. The GUI is a bit buggy, sometimes you need to resize the window to make it redraw

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work”

10. Use ChatGPT Desktop or Claude Desktop to prototype when there are many branches and screens

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “When and why prototyping is still needed when working with AI agents”

11. New actual decent features are shipped almost weekly on Claude code and Claude desktop.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation”

12. eliminates numerous problems that would arise from installing and authenticating a CLI

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “MCP Is Dead; Long Live MCP”

13. Claude Desktop, Cowork, Code, Design all get meaningful new features week over week.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup”

14. It's like a consumer grade for the masses thing, people like apps on their desktop

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “When Code is Free, Why is Claude is an Electron app?”

15. Having faith on a for-profit organization about doing the right thing, with access to your computer and the things you do on it, may be a bit too much.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Anthropic installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop”

16. Wish Pi (and Opencode, DeepSeek Harness, Claude, Claude Desktop, Codex Desktop) was written in a memory and performance efficient language.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Pi 1.0”

17. The software quality is generally horrible. It surely has improved a lot over the last couple of months, but it is still pretty horrible.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning”

18. A recent build has an escaped bug where it is trying to read the claude_desktop_config.json config file from the virtualized file system

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Claude Desktop on Windows Broke MCP”

19. Electron apps in general are resource monsters and while some are better than the others, Claude Desktop is definitely not one of them.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native”

20. I uninstalled it because I have no need for Claude Desktop and there's no way to keep the 10+ GiB VM image off of my machine

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it”

21. Anthropic wants a world where they own your agent where it can't exist outside of the Claude desktop app or Claude Code.

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Schedule Claude Code tasks on the web”

22. I seriously don't understand how a company with this much money doesn't have some of the more basic ux implemented

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux”

23. A native macOS version of Claude Desktop (and therefore Claude Cowork) would be a huge step forward for Anthropic.

    Criticizes · Jul 2026 · in “Claude's Criminally Bad Electron Mac App Is an Inside Job”

24. Anthropic is a proprietary walled garden with poor service trading solely on dominance in a single product field

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux”

25. Claude's Electron app vs. Codex's native app is one such example right off the first impression of both products

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “$500 GPU outperforms Claude Sonnet on coding benchmarks”

26. any time I accidentally click Cowork which I don't use whatsoever, it re-makes the same VM, without asking me

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it”

27. Claude Desktop looks like a demo app. It's slow to use and so far behind the Codex app that it's embarassing.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use”

28. These directories/settings explicitly exist in well-known locations to allow applications to configure and interoperate with each other.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Anthropic's Claude Desktop App Installs Undisclosed Native Messaging Bridge”

29. It absolutely “understood” my room, identifying the different (messy) workspaces and various piles of stuff on the ground.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Parametric CAD in Rust”

30. I'd have a hard time describing the Claude harness and the rest of its associated software as anything less than "good"

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Don't Make Me Use Your Harness”

31. something like the GPT/Claude desktop apps are pretty good, where the interaction with agents is front-and-center

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Ask HN: Is the Future of IDEs Bleak?”

32. That is one afternoon's worth of work vs. hiring a contractor, designer, multiple rounds of iterations over weeks

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Drupal is now light-years ahead of its reputation”

33. If you gave somebody the claude desktop app with blender mcp 10 years ago their minds would be absolutely blown.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories”

34. In my experience if you provide some skills and access to some data it can generate pretty consistent invoices.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Show HN: European alternatives to Google, Apple, Dropbox and 120 US apps”

35. tried again and created a working design skill that can create design artifacts following the brand guidelines

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6”

36. It seems obvious that Claude Desktop needs a VM for security for the majority of it's actual real world use.

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it”

37. If I could pay a world class architect $1.50 to give me tips on how to maximize sunlight in my loft I would.

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?”

38. native built-in browser integration, links, etc which the (Mac) desktop apps like ChatGPT or Claude offer

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “OpenClaw 2.0, Accidentally”

39. Claude Desktop on macOS infinitely better at managing RAM when you have 10+ or more parallel sessions.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Anthropic, please ship an official Claude Desktop for Linux”

40. can help regular people build, a fully functioning, scalable and maintainable program on any platform

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs”