GitHub Desktop for Linux

Tobias Etzold • October 10, 2021

linux

Git itself is a terminal based application but not everyone likes to commit changes via terminal commands. Then you can reach out to a gui client for git. One of this clients is GitHub Desktop. But officially they only support Windows and Mac OS.

But if you like to use GitHub Desktop under Linux, Brandon Forster, a developer at GitHub who maintains a fork of GitHub Desktop that works under Linux, gets you covered. It runs on Debian & Ubuntu based distributions and also on Red Hat, CentOS or Fedora derivates. There is even support for Arch Linux.

To install GitHub Desktop you can follow the instructions on https://github.com/shiftkey/desktop. This allows for automatic software updates via apt or another package manager. If you like to install it directly via a package, you can download the current version under https://github.com/shiftkey/desktop/releases.

If you just want to give GitHub Desktop a try, download the AppImage file under the releases page.

chmod a+x GitHubDesktop-linux-*-linux3.AppImage

./GitHubDesktop-linux-*-linux3.AppImage

The first command sets the AppImage file to executable and the second command starts GitHub Desktop.