The desktop app is a community project that has not been updated by the project maintainer for a while so there may be some package-related issues on some platforms.
However, it’s only an electron app that wraps the admin that lives on https://yoursite.com/ghost/. Unless you have multiple Ghost sites and want the sidebar in the desktop app for easy switching you’re not missing anything by using the web admin. If you want the same “desktop” experience of clicking an icon to open a single-site app then you could use nativefier or similar to achieve the same thing.