AI Booster on Linux

The Linux client is a Qt 6 / QML desktop application. Packages are published on GitHub Releases.

It is built and run on Ubuntu 22.04 (Qt 6.2) and Ubuntu 24.04 (Qt 6.4). Other distributions with Qt 6.2 or newer generally work, but those two are the ones that are actually tested.

Install

Download the package for your architecture from the releases page and install it with your distribution's package manager.

The release packages include a prebuilt tunnelling engine, so they work as soon as they are installed. Nothing further needs to be fetched.

How it is put together

Worth understanding, because it explains several things you might otherwise read as bugs:

The user interface and the tunnelling engine are two separate programs. The client launches the engine as a child process and talks to it over loopback — it never loads the engine into itself. The boundary is deliberate: the engine is GPL-3.0 and a separate work, and keeping it out of process also means an engine that crashes surfaces as an error in the window instead of taking the whole application down with it.

A consequence you will see: if the engine fails to start, the UI stays up and reports it. That is the design working, not a half-crash.

The client is open source — the interface, not the engine. The repository is AllianceInterStellar/aibooster-linux, and it carries build instructions if you want to compile it yourself. Note that a build from source does not include the engine; you supply that separately.

The desktop proxy, and how to undo it

This is the most important thing on this page.

When you connect, the client redirects your desktop's proxy settings at the engine's local inbound — gsettings on GNOME, Cinnamon and MATE, kioslaverc on KDE Plasma. That is machine-wide state that outlives the process. If the client were to disappear while the proxy was redirected, every application on the desktop would keep trying to reach a port with nothing behind it, and the symptom is "the machine lost internet" with no obvious cause.

The client is built to avoid leaving you there:

• Before changing anything it writes your previous settings to $XDG_STATE_HOME/aibooster/system-proxy-restore.json, and replays that file on the next launch.
• SIGINT, SIGTERM and SIGHUP are handled, so an orderly shutdown — closing the window, logging out, rebooting — reverts the proxy immediately.
• A SIGKILL cannot be handled by any program. In that one case the proxy stays redirected until you start the app again, which restores it.

If you need to undo it by hand rather than waiting:

# GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE
gsettings set org.gnome.system.proxy mode none
 
# KDE Plasma
kwriteconfig6 --file kioslaverc --group 'Proxy Settings' --key ProxyType 0

Add a profile

Paste an individual node link or a subscription URL. The recognised schemes are the same on every platform: vless://, vmess://, trojan://, ss://, hysteria2:// (also hy2://, hy://), tuic://, wg://, ssh:// and warp://. An http:// or https:// URL is treated as a subscription — fetched and refreshable rather than stored as one fixed node.

What the interface shows

• Subscriptions and profiles, with switching between them
• The server list with measured latency, plus the engine's own selector and url-test groups
• Live traffic and connection counts, read from the engine's local API
• The engine's log stream, in the window
• Routing, DNS, inbound, TLS and WARP settings

Troubleshooting

The app starts but the engine does not. The window will say so. Check that the package installed completely — a build from source has no engine bundled by design.

The whole desktop lost network after a crash. Start AI Booster again; it replays the saved proxy settings on launch. If you would rather fix it directly, use the two commands above.

Connected, but nothing loads. Usually the node rather than the client. Try another node in the same profile first; the full diagnostic order covers the rest.

Uninstall

Remove the package with your distribution's package manager. Before you do, disconnect from inside the app so the desktop proxy settings are restored — once the package is gone, the saved-settings file will not be replayed for you.