Newelle is a GTK graphical front end for interacting with LLMs from Gnome desktop. It supports both local LLMs and online ones.
In addition to basic chat, it supports:
- Speech to text and TTS models
- Can perform web searches
- Can drag files into Newelle to discuss it’s contents
- Run terminal commands
- Manage files
- Other features like image generation can be added through it’s plugin system.
Obviously you’ll want to be careful with letting it interact with your system directly through files/terminal commands, but still sounds pretty promising.



That’s a no for me. I don’t need an AI to wipe my databases.
But I assume this will be configurable. I might find a use for some of the other bits, if it can run securely and privately.
A few things to note:
rm -rf *by hand by accident.Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr
I’ve tried Gemini-CLI, and while it can run terminal commands, it asks permission before each one. Being able to read the commands and then click yes once I see what it’s doing can work pretty well in my experience, and should be somewhat safe.
They do recommend running gemini-cli inside a container though, for added safety. I’m not sure if that’s possible with Newelle yet.
That sounds much safer.
Having now spent some time with Newelle, it asks for permission before running commands as well. By default the commands are run inside the flatpak sandbox as well. It even gives the option to run the commands in an external window and see the results before deciding whether to let the LLM access the results of the command (in case you’re worried the results might have private info you don’t want shared.
Overall it handles it really well to be honest.