WorkBuddy CN

This is a community package of WorkBuddy CN, 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.

This is the China ("CN") build from workbuddy.cn: its interface is Chinese-first and every AI feature requires signing in with a workbuddy.cn (Tencent) account; the app itself is free to install. Outside mainland China, install the international build, WorkBuddy AI (com.tencent.WorkBuddyAI), which signs in with a workbuddy.ai account instead. The two are separate apps and can be installed side by side.

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.