Alpaka Desktop

Alpaka Desktop is a local-first AI interface that brings the power of Ollama to your desktop with a native experience. It focuses on performance, privacy, and deep integration with the Linux desktop environment.

---

✨ Features

• ⚡ Real-time Streaming — Token-by-token rendering with live Markdown, Shiki syntax highlighting, and KaTeX math.
• 🧠 Thinking Blocks — Collapsible <think> panels for models that expose chain-of-thought reasoning (e.g., DeepSeek R1, GPT-OSS).
• 🗜️ Smart Context Management — Automatic sliding-window truncation on every send, plus a one-click Compact action that summarises the conversation and continues in a new chat with the summary as the system prompt.
• 🖥️ Multi-host Management — Manage multiple Ollama endpoints (local, LAN, Cloud) with background health pings every 30 seconds. Switch between hosts from Settings → Connection.
• 🔒 Secure Keyring — API keys, OAuth tokens, and per-host bearer tokens stored in the system Secret Service (KWallet, GNOME Keyring, KeePassXC) — never in the database, never on disk.
• 📦 Model Manager — Pull (with progress), delete, star, tag, and create custom models from Modelfiles. Configurable model storage path with a systemd override.
• 🎛️ Three-layer Settings — Global defaults → Per-model overrides → Per-chat adjustments. Mirostat 1/2, fixed seed, stop sequences, presets (Creative / Balanced / Precise / Code) and user-defined profiles.
• 🌐 Web Search — Built-in agentic tool-call loop (up to 5 iterations) via the Ollama Web Search API, with collapsible result cards.
• 📁 Folder Context — Drop a folder or text file onto the chat input and it's ingested as a system message. (Per-file selection from a tree picker is planned for v1.3 — today the whole folder is ingested, capped at 50 MB / 1000 files.)
• 🖼️ Multimodal Input — Attach images via the menu or drag-drop; up to 10 images × 20 MB. Vision-model support follows the Ollama capability flag. (Ctrl+V paste was removed in v1.2.0 — it was broken on WebKitGTK/Wayland.)
• ⌨️ Keyboard-first — Ctrl+N new chat, Ctrl+K search conversations, Ctrl+M model switcher, Ctrl+, settings, Ctrl+H connection settings, Escape stop generation, plus full undo/redo in the input.
• 💾 Backup & Restore — Native SQLite online backup from Settings → Maintenance.
• 🐧 Native Linux UX — System tray (Show / Hide / Quit), desktop notifications via D-Bus, smart-focus suppression, and first-class Wayland support.

---

📺 See It In Action

Streaming Chat	Thinking Blocks

---

🚀 Quick Start

📦 Installation

AppImage (Universal)

Download the latest .AppImage from Releases, then:

chmod +x alpaka-desktop_*.AppImage
./alpaka-desktop_*.AppImage --appimage-integrate

Debian / Ubuntu (APT)

# 1. Import signing key
sudo mkdir -p /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://nikoteressi.github.io/alpaka-desktop/apt/key.gpg | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/alpaka-desktop.asc > /dev/null

# 2. Add repository
echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/alpaka-desktop.asc] \
  https://nikoteressi.github.io/alpaka-desktop/apt stable main" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/alpaka-desktop.list

# 3. Install
sudo apt update && sudo apt install alpaka-desktop

Arch Linux (AUR)

yay -S alpaka-desktop-bin

---

🛠️ Build from Source

Prerequisites

• Rust (stable ≥ 1.77.2)
• Node.js (≥ 20) + pnpm
• Linux system dependencies: libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev, libappindicator3-dev, librsvg2-dev

Steps

git clone https://github.com/nikoteressi/alpaka-desktop.git
cd alpaka-desktop
pnpm install
pnpm tauri build

Build artifacts can be found in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/.

---

📋 Requirements

• Linux (x86_64)
• Ollama running locally or on a reachable host.
• Secret Service provider for keyring (KWallet, GNOME Keyring, or KeepassXC).

---

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct and the process for submitting pull requests.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.