Future Quest: Separate Desktop and Studio Builds

[ansys1965]

Problem

studio/setup.sh / install.sh always downloads the full Studio stack into per-user directories (~/.unsloth), even when a system-wide unsloth-studio installation already exists.

This makes it difficult to package Studio and Desktop as two separate distro packages: the Desktop client pulls its own copy of the Studio payload instead of using an already-installed Studio runtime.

What I tested

I built Unsloth Studio and Unsloth Desktop as two separate Arch Linux packages:

• unsloth-studio — provides the system-wide Studio runtime
• unsloth-studio-desktop — provides the desktop client and uses the existing Studio installation

With a small set of downstream patches, the Desktop package works correctly without downloading or installing another Studio runtime.

Patches used for the experiment:

https://gist.github.com/ansys1965/e53b74276af74797aa6e99a0a80a4d7c

The patches:

1. Disable the automatic user-level Studio installation.
2. Allow the Desktop client to use an externally installed Studio runtime (/opt/unsloth-studio).
3. Remove the assumptions that Studio must be installed into the user's home directory.

This is not an Arch-specific ask — the same problem exists for anyone packaging Unsloth for a Linux distribution or an air-gapped/offline installation.

Request

Would you consider supporting an install-prefix override (environment variable, command-line option, or another mechanism) instead of hardcoding user-home paths, so downstream packaging can separate the Studio runtime from the Desktop client without maintaining out-of-tree patches?

The goal would be to allow a Desktop installation to depend on an already-installed Studio runtime rather than downloading and installing a second copy.

Happy to provide the complete Arch PKGBUILD and build details if useful.

[shimmyshimmer]

Hello @ansys1965 thank you for your feedback, is it possible to convert this into a github issue? Thank you!

[ansys1965]

Yes, please go ahead — thank you!