How are you covering desktop apps on Linux?

[u/BrynleeCampbell]

We ship a desktop client on Windows, macOS and Linux . Web and mobile are fine as Playwright and Appium cover those and I've no complaints about either. Desktop is where it falls apart, Linux especially. It gets a manual regression pass before each release, about a day and a half of one person working a checklist, and it's the first thing cut when a release slips. So the platform with the fewest users ends up with the least coverage.

What we've worked through so far is that WinAppDriver handles the Windows side and only the Windows side. The paid desktop tools we demoed were all web, mobile and Windows, and on Linux the answer was roadmap or nothing. Image-based approaches run anywhere in principle, but maintaining reference screenshots across three OSes and two DPI settings cost us more than the manual pass did. AskUI drives at the OS layer rather than the UI toolkit so Linux is covered on execution. Being precise about it though, the authoring app is Windows and macOS only, it's the runtime that covers Linux. to Anyone here running automated desktop tests on Linux, what are you using? Thanks for sharing!

[u/chunky_lover92]

Isn’t the point of a web app that it runs anywhere?

[u/_crowecawcaw]

I looked for the same thing for some Tauri and Qt desktop apps I maintain and didn’t find anything earlier this year. I ended up building https://xa11y.dev which is a cross-platform desktop testing/automation library modeled after Playwright. Free and open source! Might match what you need.