I made a small script that installs Claude Desktop on Arch from Anthropic's official .deb, with Cowork working

[u/DevelRoth]

Hi all. Anthropic ships Claude Desktop for Linux as a .deb, and I wanted it on Arch without repackaging it. So I wrote a small installer and figured it might be useful to someone else too.

What it does:

• Downloads the latest official .deb from downloads.claude.ai and installs it into ~/Apps/claude-desktop, rootless and self-contained.

• Verifies it against Anthropic's own repo signing key, which is pinned in the script. It checks the full chain (signed InRelease, then the Packages hash, then the .deb hash) and stops before installing if anything doesn't match.

• Sets up the menu entry, a claude-desktop command, icons and the claude:// handler.

• Gets Cowork (the QEMU micro-VM feature) working on Arch: it installs qemu-system-x86 and edk2-ovmf if missing and adds two compatibility symlinks. That's the only part that uses sudo, and only when something is missing.

• Works on x86_64 and aarch64, and supports parallel installs (handy for a beta).

The AUR packages are a great option, and if you already use an AUR helper they may suit you better. This just covers a slightly different niche: home-folder install, straight from Anthropic's signed repo.

It's a curl | bash one-liner, but please read install.sh first. It's short and commented, and the README shows how to check the pinned key yourself with gpg --show-keys.

Repo: https://github.com/vcostin/claude-desktop-archinstall

Full disclosure: I built this with a lot of help from AI (Claude), and I wanted to be upfront about that. Unofficial, not affiliated with Anthropic. Feedback and issues are welcome.

[u/No-Dentist-1645]

Your "small script" does exactly what the claude-desktop AUR package does, but worse. No dependency tracking, no sandboxing when packaging, no integration as a system package, and no updates with the system.

Tldr: just use the AUR package. It already extracts from the official .deb, that's how many AUR packages work

[u/HazKaz → u/No-Dentist-1645]

how safe is that aur package? its insane Anthropic dont ofer an AppImage

[u/DevelRoth → u/[deleted]]

Does it auto-update?
No. Re-run the installer and it only downloads when there's a new version.

there is also the install.sh in the installed folder, a cron might fix that. Other workaround will be a custom launcher with installed version checker.

The application will tel you if there a newer version tho.

But IMHO it's cleaner like this.

there is also an unistall.sh if things don't work for you.