My favorite Linux app didn’t exist on Windows—so I built a better one with Claude
My favorite Linux app didn’t exist on Windows—so I built a better one with Claude
Publish Date: 2026-07-04 12:15:00
Source Domain: www.howtogeek.com
Everyone’s talking about AI coding tools right now, but most of the examples feel abstract—a web-based operating system, a DOOM clone, portfolio websites. They’re cool, but they don’t really solve real problems in your day-to-day life. Well, I’ve been running into a frustrating app gap lately where some of the tools I rely on in Linux don’t exist on Windows, and vice versa. That disconnect has been slowing down my workflow, so I decided to vibe-code my way out of it.
The Linux app I desperately want on Windows
It’s a simple image annotation app—but it’s critical to my workflow
The Linux app I couldn’t find an equivalent for on Windows was Gwenview—the default image viewer on KDE Plasma-based Linux distributions.
As a tech writer, I add a lot of annotated screenshots to my articles—arrows pointing at buttons, boxes around specific settings, text boxes to explain something—and Gwenview made that workflow incredibly fast and convenient. Sure, you can technically do the same thing in a dedicated image editor like GIMP (which works on both Linux and Windows), but that adds unnecessary overhead. I wanted something that launched quickly and allowed for fast point-and-click edits.
Unfortunately, I was hard-pressed to find a similar app on Windows. The built-in Photos app in Windows 11 is decent, but it’s no Gwenview, lacking basic annotation tools like arrows and text. Granted, there are plenty of third-party alternatives, but most of the free ones were buggy, and the good ones were paid.
I even tried running Gwenview through Windows Subsystem for Linux, and while it technically worked, the experience was janky. I…
