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Ekorbia v0.3 — Windows and Linux are here

Ekorbia 0.3.0 is out, and for the first time it's more than a Mac app. The same release ships native Windows and Linux bundles alongside the macOS .dmg.

Linux

Three bundle formats ship from the release pipeline, so you can pick whichever your distro likes:

  • .deb — Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!_OS, and anything else that speaks dpkg.
  • .rpm — Fedora, RHEL, openSUSE, and the rest of the dnf / zypper crowd.
  • .AppImage — a single chmod-and-double-click binary for any modern x86_64 distro, no install step.

Builds run on Ubuntu 22.04 for broad glibc compatibility. Full chat, attachments, folder RAG, watches, prompts, memory file, chat-tool file saves, OS notifications (libnotify), and full-text history search all work on day one.

Two features are deferred to a later release: the always-on-top quick-query overlay, and screenshot capture.

Windows

Two installers, depending on what your IT team prefers:

  • .msi — for Group Policy / silent install scenarios.
  • NSIS .exe — for everyone else.

Both embed the WebView2 bootstrapper, so even a clean Windows 10 box without WebView2 will launch cleanly. The overlay window uses window-vibrancy for Acrylic / Mica translucency, which is the closest thing Windows offers to the vibrancy effect Ekorbia uses on macOS — same shape, slightly different texture.

The screenshot capture feature is deferred on Windows.

Platform-aware UI

A few small details flip per OS so the app feels native rather than ported:

  • The quick-query overlay's default hotkey is ⌘⇧Space on macOS and Alt+Space on Windows. Win-key combinations are reserved by Windows itself for input-method switching, so we follow the PowerToys Run / Raycast Windows convention.
  • Inline hotkey hints (⌘↵, ⌘K, ⌘N) render with their command-key glyphs on macOS and flip to textual Ctrl+... on Linux and Windows.
  • The first-launch onboarding tour adapts its slide-2 hotkey content to whichever hotkeys are actually wired up on the current platform.

Under the hood: Ollama transport via Rust

Every Ollama HTTP call (/api/tags, /api/ps, /api/generate, streaming /api/chat) now goes through a Tauri command rather than a direct fetch() from the WebView.

WebView2 enforces Chromium's Private Network Access preflight on any fetch from the app's tauri://localhost origin to 127.0.0.1, and Ollama doesn't reply with the required Access-Control-Allow-Private-Network: true header — so on Windows, every direct fetch silently failed and Ekorbia would confidently report "Ollama not running" even when it clearly was.

Routing through Rust bypasses the browser network stack entirely. As a side benefit, all network I/O is now in one place (Rust, via reqwest), the streaming chat loop became a Tauri Channel<T> rather than a ReadableStream, and mid-stream cancellation runs through a small per-request flag registry. Same behaviour on every platform; the Windows fix comes along for free.

CI and release pipeline

Shipping for three platforms means building on three platforms in CI. ci.yml now runs cargo fmt --check, clippy, and cargo test --lib on macOS, Ubuntu 22.04, and Windows for every push. The UI test suite (Node helpers + Playwright WebKit) runs on macOS only — WebKit is the closest engine to WebKitGTK / WKWebView and duplicating it elsewhere adds no signal, just runtime cost.

The release pipeline was restructured into three stages: create-draft → build matrix (3 OSes in parallel) → SHA256SUMS + publish. A single tag push produces a draft GitHub Release with all five bundles attached, then flips it to published once every build succeeds. Prerelease tags (any tag containing a -) are automatically marked as pre-releases.

How to get it

The releases page has bundles for all three platforms.

If you're on Windows or Linux for the first time, the README install section has per-OS first-launch instructions (SmartScreen warning on Windows, AppImage chmod +x on Linux, etc.).

Two important notes:

  • Windows code signing isn't done, so SmartScreen will warn on first launch. Click More info → Run anyway and you're in.
  • Overlay and screenshot capture Quick-query overlay feature is not available on Linux. Screenshot capture is not available on Linux or Windows.