WorkBuddy

This is a community package of WorkBuddy, maintained independently and unaffiliated with Tencent. It repackages the official upstream Linux Debian build unmodified.

WorkBuddy is Tencent's AI agent workspace for office work. You describe a task in your own words; it breaks the task down, plans the steps and carries them out on your machine, then hands back a finished artifact rather than a chat reply. Several agents can work in parallel, and it ships its own Node and Python runtimes so its tools run without anything installed on the host.

• Draft documents, spreadsheets and slide decks from a description.
• Pull a dataset apart and return an analysis with charts.
• Chain several agents across the steps of one longer task.
• Extend it with skills, connectors and MCP servers from its marketplace.

The interface is Chinese-first and every AI feature requires signing in with a Tencent account; the app itself is free to install.

Running shell commands needs one setting changed. WorkBuddy confines the commands its agent runs with a built-in sandbox that is built on Linux user namespaces and mount operations. Flatpak's own sandbox does not permit those to an app inside it, so with the built-in sandbox switched on the agent's command tool cannot start and reports a lost connection. Open Settings, Security Center and turn "Sandbox security" off; commands then run normally, confined by this package's Flatpak permissions instead. Chat, documents and any task that does not shell out work either way.

Permissions: this package grants network, display, GPU, audio, notifications, tray and keyring access, plus two directories WorkBuddy hardcodes — ~/.workbuddy for its account state, plugins, skills and downloaded runtimes, and ~/WorkBuddy, where it creates a workspace per task. It does not grant broad home-directory access, so an agent running with the built-in sandbox off still cannot reach the rest of your files; pick anything else through the file-chooser portal, or widen the grant yourself:

• Let the agent work on existing files at their real paths: flatpak override --user --filesystem=home com.tencent.WorkBuddy
• Or scope it to one directory: flatpak override --user --filesystem=xdg-documents com.tencent.WorkBuddy

Updates come through Flatpak: this package tracks upstream's own version feed, so a new upstream build arrives with flatpak update.