CodexUse now runs on Windows and Linux

CodexUse was a Mac app. It now ships four desktop packages: Apple Silicon macOS, Windows 11 x64, and Ubuntu 24.04 on x64 and arm64. This page is the honest version of what that means, including the four features that stay on macOS and why.

What you can download

Every package is built and smoke-tested on its own operating system and architecture: build, artifact validation, install, first launch, and a second launch, on hosted x64 and ARM runners and on Linux under Xvfb. Nothing here is cross-compiled from a Mac, and a package that fails those checks is not published. The Windows installer is currently unsigned, so Windows may show a SmartScreen warning during installation.

What changed inside the app

Porting a desktop shell is mostly the unglamorous parts. The local app state, account and profile management, Codex CLI discovery, custom providers, the ChatGPT Web transport, tray, clipboard, file manager actions, and browser actions all now use platform-specific paths and process behavior. Windows uses named pipes for the single-instance channel, the Work planner channel, and the ChatGPT Web broker; macOS and Linux use Unix sockets. User data follows the platform convention: ~/Library/Application Support/codexuse-desktop, %APPDATA%\codexuse-desktop, or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/codexuse-desktop.

The ChatGPT Web helper is built for the platform it ships on. A macOS helper is never copied into a Windows or Linux package, and a release that omitted the helper cannot be published as a public build.

The four macOS-only features, and why

CodexUse gives an account its own Codex window by driving OpenAI’s official Codex app. OpenAI ships that app for macOS. Everything built on top of it inherits that limit:

• One Codex window per account. Open and Show, the status word, and outside-window detection all act on official app windows.
• Planner-first Work runs. The planner thinks in its own Codex window, so a run cannot start without one. On Windows and Linux the Work tab stays available for reviewing and recovering runs that already exist.
• Auto-roll. Rolling work to the next account means opening that account’s window.
• Telegram remote. A message from your phone runs in a Codex window on the machine at home.

Rather than showing controls that fail, CodexUse disables these outside macOS and says why on the control itself. If the official Codex app reaches another platform, this is the list that changes.

Known limits in this first release

• Windows does not update itself yet. Automatic updates are disabled because the packaging runtime cannot apply one reliably. Download the newer package and install it over the old one.
• Linux update artifacts ship, but the lifecycle is still in QA. Treat a Linux upgrade as a manual step until that passes.
• No Windows arm64 build. The packaging runtime publishes none, so ARM PCs run the x64 package under emulation.
• No Intel Mac build. Use the cross-platform CLI there.
• Work check commands are less sandboxed outside macOS. On macOS a required check runs in the process sandbox. On Windows and Linux it runs in the repository with an isolated temporary home and no extra operating-system sandbox, so treat project check commands as trusted.
• Ubuntu 24.04 is the tested distribution. Others may work once their GTK and WebKitGTK 4.1 packages are confirmed.

If you already own Pro

Nothing to buy. One license activates on up to five computers in any mix of macOS, Windows, and Linux. Cloud Sync moves accounts and settings between them with a passphrase you choose, and it never uploads run state or conversation history.

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