Kutumb on Windows and Ubuntu.

The .deb, unless you have a reason not to. It puts Kutumb in your applications menu like anything else, updates cleanly, and — the part that matters on current Ubuntu — it is the only one of the three that can set up Chromium’s sandbox helper for you.

That caveat applies to both of the other formats, so it is worth understanding once. Ubuntu 24.04 and newer stop an ordinary program from using the sandbox Chromium prefers, so it falls back to a small helper that has to be owned by root. A package installer can arrange that; an archive you unpacked yourself cannot. Start one of those builds without arranging it and the app exits on the spot, complaining about chrome-sandbox. The portable folder is still perfectly usable — it needs one sudo chmod, printed on its download page — but it is no longer the answer for a machine you do not administer, and we would rather say so than let you find out.

The AppImage is the one to avoid on those releases. It has a second, unrelated problem: they replaced the FUSE 2 helper it needs with fusermount3, so it will not start by double-clicking, and installing libfuse2 does not fix it, whatever the internet says. Running it as ./f-tree-*.AppImage --appimage-extract-and-run gets past that and walks straight into the sandbox problem above — which cannot be solved for a folder that is unpacked fresh into a temporary directory every time it runs.

Save a new tree once, choosing where it lives, and from then on every change is saved as you make it — there is no Save button to forget, and closing the window finishes any save still under way first. Each save is written to a temporary file first and only then swapped in for yours, so a crash or a full disk mid-save leaves the last good version in place, not half a tree. If a save does fail, the bar says so and offers to try again.

The app also keeps the last five versions of every tree in its own folder: one from before the first save each time the app starts, then at most one every ten minutes. File › Show backups opens that folder. Your own copy somewhere else is still worth having for anything you care about — a second disk, a USB stick, or the phone.

Because the Android app looks for its updates in the same list of releases, and it reads whichever one GitHub calls the latest. Every desktop release is filed as a pre-release so that the latest is always an Android one, and no phone is ever offered a desktop installer. It is a filing rule, not a verdict: the builds offered on this page are the stable ones.

Not yet. Windows and Linux are what is built and tested today.

It reads the file you open and writes one small note of which file that was, so it can reopen it next time. No account, no server, no telemetry. The window itself is refused the network outright — which is why its typefaces are read from disk rather than fetched from Google. The only request the app can make is the update check, and that is off until you switch it on in Settings.

Two switches under Settings, both off when you install: check automatically, which looks once at startup and stays quiet unless there is something to say, and offer me betas, which asks before it turns on. Anything downloaded is checked against the SHA-256 GitHub published for it before you are offered it to run; if they disagree the file is deleted and nothing is installed.

Everything the phone app does with a tree. It reads one — the chart, a compact reading you can follow at any size, the people index and the search — and it builds and edits one: add a person, add a relative, correct a fact, remove a relationship, and undo any of it, with every change saved as you make it. It imports a relative’s file into the tree you have, matching people rather than duplicating them. It answers how two people are related, in English and in हिन्दी. It adds and frames photographs. Updates are checked against a SHA-256 if you ask for them.

One thing the phone has that this deliberately does not: a focused chart — the drawn tree narrowed to one person’s line, with everybody else hidden. A phone screen needs that. A laptop’s does not, and Compact answers the same want better here: one person’s family as generation bands, readable without zooming and reachable by a screen reader, which a canvas never is. #89 has the checklist and the reasoning.