Is GitHub Desktop available for GNU/Linux?

2 min readAug 25, 2020

Currently, Github Desktop for GNU/Linux is not officially supported by the GitHub, but there is a fork that hosts a version for Debian/Ubuntu & Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora distributions.

How to get it on your desktop?

Debian/Ubuntu distributions

To set up the package repository, run these commands:

wget -qO - https://packagecloud.io/shiftkey/desktop/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64] https://packagecloud.io/shiftkey/desktop/any/ any main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/packagecloud-shiftky-desktop.list'

sudo apt-get update

Then install GitHub Desktop:

sudo apt install github-desktop

Or, You can directly download the .deb package from the archlinux AUR

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/github-desktop-bin

Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora distributions

To setup the package repository, run these commands:

sudo rpm --import https://packagecloud.io/shiftkey/desktop/gpgkey

sudo sh -c 'echo -e "[shiftkey]\nname=GitHub Desktop\nbaseurl=https://packagecloud.io/shiftkey/desktop/el/7/\$basearch\nenabled=1\ngpgcheck=0\nrepo_gpgcheck=1\ngpgkey=https://packagecloud.io/shiftkey/desktop/gpgkey" > /etc/yum.repos.d/shiftkey-desktop.repo'

Then install GitHub Desktop:

*if yum is your package manager

sudo yum install github-desktop

*if dnf is your package manager

sudo dnf install github-desktop