This is an actively-maintained community fork that continues the excellent Linux work of
shiftkey/desktop, which has been inactive since mid-2025. Our focus is shipping regular, reliable Ubuntu / Debian (.deb) releases of GitHub Desktop for Linux — with.rpmand AppImage builds too.
⚠️ Unofficial build. GitHub Desktop for Linux is a community project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or supported by GitHub, Inc. “GitHub” and “GitHub Desktop” are trademarks of GitHub, Inc. This fork exists solely to provide Linux packages of the MIT-licensed source.
- 📦 Releases: see the Releases page
- 🐛 Found a bug? Open an issue
- 🙏 Credit: huge thanks to @shiftkey and all prior contributors for years of Linux packaging work this fork builds on.
GitHub Desktop is an open-source Electron-based GitHub app. It is written in TypeScript and uses React.
This repository contains specific patches on top of the upstream
desktop/desktop repository to support Linux usage.
It also publishes releases for various Linux distributions:
- AppImage (
.AppImage) - Debian (
.deb) - RPM (
.rpm)
Our signed APT repository installs github-desktop and keeps it up to date through apt:
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://apt.guysinc.pub/guysinc-apt.gpg | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/guysinc-apt.gpg > /dev/null
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/guysinc-apt.gpg] https://apt.guysinc.pub/github-desktop stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/guysinc-github-desktop.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install github-desktopThe repository is GPG-signed; the fingerprint to verify is
F45B B6D3 4D82 EF56 BB97 FBE0 F305 FB33 592B 46C8.
That is the primary key. gpg --show-keys will also list signing subkeys — one per
project — and it is a subkey that signs this repository. The primary certifies the
subkeys, stays offline, and survives their rotation, which is why it is the one
published here.
The signing and publishing half of this pipeline is being extracted into
archivist, a separate MIT-licensed
project: point it at a directory of .deb files and get a signed apt repository on
storage you own. If you have been putting loose .deb files on a Releases page because
reprepro, GPG-in-CI and repository metadata looked like too much work, that is the
problem it exists to remove.
It is pre-release — the design and the decision records are written down, the CLI is
not finished, and this repository still publishes with reprepro directly today. Nothing
to install yet; the roadmap
is the honest status.
Prebuilt packages for every release are on the
Releases page —
.deb, .rpm, and .AppImage for x64 and ARM.
We don't host an RPM repository yet, so install the downloaded package directly:
sudo dnf install ./GitHubDesktop-linux-*.rpm # Fedora / RHEL
sudo zypper install ./GitHubDesktop-linux-*.rpm # openSUSEchmod +x GitHubDesktop-linux-*.AppImage
./GitHubDesktop-linux-*.AppImagegnome-keyring is required for saving credentials — see the
Arch Wiki.
Community-maintained AUR packages may exist but are not produced by this project.
If you hit trouble, see the Known issues document for guidance and workarounds.
Please check out the README on the upstream GitHub Desktop project and desktop.github.com for more product-oriented information about GitHub Desktop.
See our getting started documentation for more information on how to set up, authenticate, and configure GitHub Desktop.
The MIT license grant is not for GitHub's trademarks, which include the logo designs. GitHub reserves all trademark and copyright rights in and to all GitHub trademarks. GitHub's logos include, for instance, the stylized Invertocat designs that include "logo" in the file title in the following folder: logos.
GitHub® and its stylized versions and the Invertocat mark are GitHub's Trademarks or registered Trademarks. When using GitHub's logos, be sure to follow the GitHub logo guidelines.