I decided I am going to create 1 desktop app a day for the new Ubuntu release because noone ships linux. It's crazy they expect us to dev in linux but ship for windows and mac but you know what ? I am tired of bouncing back and forth! Linux for this windows for that ohhh check in on the kids switch to mac. It;s enough. So here is app 5 (if you dont count the Voicebox I made earlier today because their junk was busted and their instructions were just build it from source... Yeah thanks Chad...Here ya go. "Kimi Desktop on Ubuntu 26.04: Fixing the Broken .deb with Tauri v2"
"The official Kimi desktop app can't install on Ubuntu 24.04+ because it depends on a removed library. Here's how I rebuilt it with Tauri v2 and Pake v3 to fix it."
You install the official Kimi desktop .deb, fire sudo dpkg -i, and boom:
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of kimi:
kimi depends on libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37; however:
Package libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37 is not installed.
That library doesn't exist on Ubuntu 24.04, let alone 26.04. It was removed from the repos over a year ago. The official Kimi desktop package is built on Tauri v1, which hard-depends on libwebkit2gtk-4.0.so.37 — a library that shipped with webkit2gtk 4.0, superseded by 4.1 and then dropped entirely.
So the app is just... broken on any modern Ubuntu. Here's how I fixed it.
The problem in one sentence
Tauri v1 → libwebkit2gtk-4.0 → removed from Ubuntu 24.04+ → dpkg fails.
The fix: rebuild with Tauri v2
Tauri v2 links against libwebkit2gtk-4.1, which is the version shipped in Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04. So the fix is straightforward: rebuild the app with Tauri v2 instead of v1.
I used Pake v3, which wraps any web app into a native desktop app using Tauri under the hood. One build script, one config file, and you get a .deb that actually installs.
What you get
Tauri v2 runtime — Links against libwebkit2gtk-4.1, the one Ubuntu actually ships
OAuth / SSO — --new-window flag means Google sign-in works in-app instead of being blocked
System tray — Desktop integration that works
1200x780 window — Matches the original Kimi desktop dimensions
Rebuild it yourself
Prerequisites — Rust, Node, and the usual GTK/webkit dev packages:
# Rust >= 1.85
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
# Node.js >= 22 — use nvm, brew, whatever you prefer
# Build deps
sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libgtk-3-dev \
libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev
# Pake CLI
npm install -g pake-cli
Then it's one command:
./build.sh
The .deb lands in dist/. Install it:
sudo dpkg -i dist/kimi_1.0.0_amd64.deb
Done. Kimi runs natively on Ubuntu 26.04 with no missing libraries.
The config that makes it work
Everything lives in config/pake.json. The important bits:
{
"windows": [{
"url": "https://kimi.moonshot.cn",
"new_window": true,
"width": 1200,
"height": 780
}],
"user_agent": {
"linux": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/133.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
}
}
The two things that matter:
new_window: true — Without this, OAuth popups (Google sign-in, etc.) get blocked by the webview's navigation policy. This flag tells Pake/Tauri to open them in a new window instead.user_agent.linux — Spoofing a Chrome UA because some OAuth providers reject webview user agents.
Why not just use the web app in a browser?
Fair question. A native desktop app gives you:
- Alt-Tab separation — Kimi isn't buried among 40 browser tabs
- System tray — Quick access, stays running in the background
- Own window chrome — Feels like an app, not a tab
- Smaller memory footprint — Tauri uses the system webview, not a bundled Electron instance
The repo
github.com/johnohhh1/kimi-app
Clone it, build it, install it. If you're on Ubuntu 24.04+ and want Kimi as a desktop app, this is currently the only way that works.
Uninstall
If you need to remove it:
sudo dpkg -r kimi
Kimi is a product of Moonshot AI. This project uses the open-source Pake tool (MIT license) to wrap the Kimi web interface as a native desktop application.
