Chatbox: Cross-platform desktop client for ChatGPT, Claude and other LLMs
23 comments
·January 22, 2025sigismund
viraptor
I don't know if anything's actually changed here, but the issues discussing that and mentioning GPL are gone. Not "closed, fixed", but deleted instead. The author was claiming they delay the source release to prevent other projects from copying them, but argued with anyone raising the issue of that not being GPL compliant. It does not smell good.
The code currently says it's 0.10.4 (repo is for "community edition"), but the website changelog says 1.9.2.
rkagerer
Side question: For user without accounts, did ChatGPT start gating repeat visitors to its chat site behind some kind of supercookie or server-detected unique identifier?
Used to be able to throw a quick query at their site, now it just pushes me to a signup page (even after clearing cookies, incognito, etc).
So much for this announcement? https://openai.com/index/start-using-chatgpt-instantly/
auggierose
Am using that for more than half a year now, very happy with it. The update process to get a new version is a mess though, with the update notification popping up four or more times usually.
reckless
Been a long time user of Chatbox as my Android client of choice. The recent web search update has been fantastic!
theyinwhy
Hi, congrats to your product! At the top of the website you are saying "Whether it's documents, images, or code, just send your files to Chatbox." At the bottom you state "Everything stays on your device, giving you full control and peace of mind."
What is it then?
mercer
it's local, but I can see how the wording is ambiguous (not the author, so I can't vouch that there is no secret shenanigans)
TheHippo
File uploads don't work and the Linux Appimage won't start.
emptiestplace
There is very little I find more frustrating than software that could so easily be nice to use but isn't.
theyinwhy
Would be great to learn what's your view on Chatbox in that regard.
emptiestplace
Needs some usability testing - I suspect even five minutes of watching a non-technical user trying to use it would be very illuminating. UI is unintuitive throughout. Consider, one of the most frequent actions you will ever do in this type of app is start a new conversation, and here it is represented by a little button near the bottom of the sidebar where you might look for 'Settings' - apparently collapsing the sidebar is much more important. Tiny text, low contrast text, confusing collapsing/expanding sections, lack of whitespace and/or colour to differentiate message pair halves, confusing hover actions for copy, no floating or bottom of code block copy button... I'm pretty sure configuring API keys was weird for some reason as well, but I can't remember what it was.
wkat4242
How does it compare to OpenWebUI?
emptiestplace
LibreChat is probably the one you want to compare to - Claude is not supported by OpenWebUI, and the shim will cost you dearly in terms of tokens.
wkat4242
Oh yes for Claude I use LiteLLM as a proxy to use it with OpenWebUI.
I'll try librechat too (never heard of it before) but I wonder if it has the same capabilities like voice and python tools. And ollama support (95% of my AI interactions are running locally)
qqqult
can't you use it through litellm https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui/issues/3288
emptiestplace
I think that's probably the shim I was referring to - it has hardcoded context length, but it is either implemented incorrectly, Anthropic ignores it, or maybe it's on openwebui to manage the window and it just isn't? Not sure. I found it kept getting slow, so I was starting new conversations to work around that. Eventually I got suspicious and checked - I'd burned through almost $100 within a few hours.
LibreChat isn't as nice in some areas, but it's much more efficient in this regard.
funcimp
Missed opportunity not naming this ChatterBox.
brudgers
original ShowHN, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35091777
dawie
Very cool
I would avoid using Chatbox. If I remember correctly the releases in the past were built from code that is not in the repo and also there were unadressed issue with the license and positive VirusTotal scans.
There are other alternative tools out there that are less shady. One example would be jan.ai