Flufy

Unofficial arch-agnostic thin client for Slack, built with PyQt6 and QtWebEngine.

Motivation

Slack does not provide a native Linux client for ARM-based laptops. The official Slack desktop app ships only as an x86_64 Electron binary, leaving users of ARM64 devices (such as Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops) without a first-class experience. Running the x86_64 build through emulation layers is slow and unreliable.

Flufy solves this by wrapping the Slack web client in a lightweight QtWebEngine-based browser window that runs natively on any architecture supported by Qt, including aarch64 and x86_64.

Features

• Native performance on ARM64 and x86_64 Linux
• Chrome User-Agent spoofing (Slack blocks non-Chrome browsers)
• System tray icon with unread message indicators
• Desktop notifications via notify-send
• slack:// deep-link protocol handler for magic login links
• Single-instance enforcement via Unix domain socket IPC
• Persistent sessions (cookies survive restarts)
• User-configurable settings via TOML config file

Requirements

• Python 3.12+
• PyQt6 and PyQt6-WebEngine (6.7.0+)
• Linux desktop environment with a system tray
• notify-send (libnotify) for desktop notifications
• libminizip system library (required by QtWebEngine)

Installing system dependencies

On Ubuntu/Debian:

# Ubuntu 24.04+
sudo apt install libminizip1t64

# Ubuntu 22.04 and earlier
sudo apt install libminizip1

Installation

From PyPI (recommended)

pipx install flufy

# Or with pip
pip install flufy

From source

git clone https://github.com/igoropaniuk/flufy.git
cd flufy
poetry install

Post-install

On first launch, Flufy automatically creates a .desktop file and registers the slack:// protocol handler so it appears in your application launcher and handles magic login links. To manually re-register if needed:

flufy --install

Usage

flufy

Configuration

Flufy reads an optional TOML config file from ~/.config/flufy/config.toml. Supported keys:

Development

# Install dev dependencies
poetry install

# Run linter and formatter
poetry run ruff check flufy/ tests/
poetry run ruff format flufy/ tests/

# Run type checker
poetry run mypy

# Run tests
poetry run pytest

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

Disclaimer

Flufy is an unofficial Slack client and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Slack Technologies, LLC. Slack is a registered trademark of Slack Technologies, LLC.