Chute

Send and receive files across your Tailscale network, from a desktop app or straight from your file manager on a Linux device.

Tailscale's file transfer works well on macOS and Windows, where the official client quietly saves incoming files for you. On Linux there is no receiver at all — files sit in the Tailscale inbox until you remember to run tailscale file get. Chute fixes that, and makes sending a right-click instead of a command.

What it does

• Receives automatically. A supervised background receiver drops arrivals into a folder you choose, with a desktop notification. Click a received file to reveal it in your file manager.
• Sends by right-click. A Send with Chute submenu appears in Nautilus and Dolphin with one entry per online device, so sending is two clicks and no window. The entries regenerate as devices come and go.
• Sends from a window. Pick a device, drag files in or browse for them.
• Stays out of the way. Lives in the tray, starts on login if you want.

Requirements

Tailscale must be installed and running on the host, Chute is a front end for it, not a replacement. Everything else ships with the app.

Install

Auto-updating (recommended)

flatpak remote-add --user chute https://jeffawe.github.io/chute/chute.flatpakrepo
flatpak install --user chute io.github.jeffawe.Chute

flatpak update picks up new versions from then on.

One-off

Download the bundle from Releases and install it:

flatpak install --user io.github.jeffawe.Chute.flatpak

No updates with this route — reinstall a newer bundle to upgrade.

Steam Deck

Nothing special: it is an ordinary Linux machine and the commands above work unchanged. Use Desktop Mode, and make sure Tailscale is already running on the Deck first. Everything installs under $HOME, so SteamOS updates leave it alone.

packaging/install.sh wraps the bundle route with preflight checks that Tailscale is reachable from inside the sandbox, on any distro.

Building from source

Needs flatpak and flatpak-builder (or org.flatpak.Builder from Flathub):

./packaging/build.sh

This produces packaging/io.github.jeffawe.Chute.flatpak and an ostree repo in packaging/repo/. Dependencies are fetched during the build.

For development outside Flatpak you need Rust, Node, and the Tauri system libraries, then:

npm install
npm run tauri dev

Note that frontend changes only appear via tauri dev, a bare cargo build loads the dev server URL rather than the embedded assets.

How it works

Chute shells out to the tailscale CLI rather than reimplementing anything:

Need	Command
List devices	tailscale file cp --targets
Send	tailscale file cp <files> <device>:
Receive	tailscale file get --loop --conflict=rename <dir>

Every invocation lives in src-tauri/src/tailscale.rs, so a change to the CLI's output format is a one-file fix.

The Flatpak bundles its own copy of the statically linked tailscale binary, because the sandbox cannot see the host's /usr/bin. It talks to the host's tailscaled over /run/tailscale/tailscaled.sock — there is only ever one daemon and one inbox, and the bundled CLI is just another client of it.

Licence

MIT. Bundles the Tailscale CLI, which is BSD-3-Clause.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Tailscale Inc. "Tailscale" and "Taildrop" are trademarks of Tailscale Inc., used here only to describe compatibility.