This parity matters. It signals that professional creative and collaborative tools are welcome on Linux. For open-source maintainers who use Linux as their daily driver but need to manage complex pull requests from non-technical contributors, the visual diff viewer and branch manager in GitHub Desktop become accessible without leaving their preferred OS.
5/5
Before Flathub, a Linux user wanting to use the official GitHub Desktop client faced a fragmented and frustrating landscape. GitHub, owned by Microsoft, never released a native Linux .deb or .rpm file. The official website only lists Windows and macOS installers. The Linux community, in its resilient fashion, responded with unofficial workarounds: the shiftkey/Desktop fork, which required manually adding apt repositories or building from source. github desktop flathub
If you prefer visualizing branches, diffs, and history over memorizing terminal commands, GitHub Desktop is arguably the best interface available. This parity matters
This is a limitation of the app itself, not the Flatpak. GitHub Desktop has historically struggled with Git Submodules. If your workflow relies heavily on submodules, you will frequently find yourself dropping back into the terminal to fix things. 5/5 Before Flathub, a Linux user wanting to