ChatGPT's Codex desktop app lands on Linux in preview — with a Wayland IME catch

OpenAI has pushed its ChatGPT/Codex desktop app to Linux as a preview, distributed as an official x64 RPM. Early testing on Fedora 44 running KDE Plasma under Wayland surfaced a familiar Electron pain point: with Fcitx 5 as the input framework, Japanese text can’t be entered in the message composer when the app is launched normally, even though the same input method works fine in native KDE apps like KWrite.

The fix doesn’t require the usual XWayland fallback that other Chromium/Electron apps such as Obsidian need. Launching the app with three flags — —enable-features=UseOzonePlatform, —ozone-platform=wayland, and —enable-wayland-ime — restores Japanese input while keeping the app Wayland-native. Making it stick means copying the .desktop launcher into ~/.local/share/applications/, editing its Exec line to include the flags, and refreshing the menu cache with kbuildsycoca6.

The underlying issue is a recurring one for Electron-style apps on the Fedora + KDE + Wayland + Fcitx stack, and the key takeaway is that explicit Wayland IME support is enough to solve it here. That raises an obvious question for OpenAI as the Linux client matures out of preview: whether —enable-wayland-ime should simply be on by default so non-Latin input works out of the box.