As a LightBurn user and license holder, this is annoying, but I could see this being a good thing in the long run. Right now, there is very little opensource alternative to LightBurn. As of today, there is a much stronger incentive to make it happen. I’m hopeful this spurs on a modern tool in the open source community that works as an alternative. What LightBurn might have done is save them selves some support overhead and created competition. We’ll see how that works out for them.
thats a big hit for non-commercial laser cutting enthusiasts
Between Visicut and Lightburn, the later was miles away even with its quirks and testing all sorts of stuff with boxes.py was a lot of fun
Crazy to me how developers would rather abandon a project (e.g. the Linux version of their software) than open source it so that the community can continue it. If you’re abandoning it then it’s not generating profit for you anymore anyway, so literally no reason not to open source it. Oh no, are you worried people will use that to build Windows versions for free instead of paying for a licence? Boo hoo.
Honestly, Lightburn is hella developed. Even stagnated at its current state, it’s still leagues beyond anything else. It’ll continue to be a worthwhile purchase for a long time.
Many of us at LightBurn are Linux users ourselves, and this decision was made reluctantly, after careful investigation of all possible avenues for continuing Linux support.
If y'all use Linux, then how the fuck do you not know about Flatpak, or even AppImage? Christ.
So then why do they think that they must support every distribution? You would think they would jump on the chance to switch to Flatpak. The reasoning is ultimately pretty poor, so hopefully this isn't a shitty cover for some other decision like layoffs.
Doesn’t really matter if it’s not open source anyway. I prefer something open source without Linux support (that can thus have community builds) than something proprietary with Linux support.
Just open source v1.7 and let the community make their “openLight” version. They said they’re moving to custom libraries anyway, and people would be able to keep buying their products, so doesn’t seem like they stand to lose much by going the open source/abandonware route.
I was thinking about switching fron LaserGRBL to Lightburn becausethey had native Linux support… Guess I’ll keep LaserGRBL + Wine following the guide in this comment
For the its less than 1% maybe. For the the reason of there is to many distributions for us to support. Thats utter BS, just support at least rhel or debian if not just MAKE A FLATPAK.
for context i got lightburn running on my t440p with libreboot runing gentoo linux. I installed lightburn through there appimage and it works great! Im fine if they wanna drop outlandishly niece distros like triquel or hanna montana linux. But why linux as a whole!
This is a commercial product - users expect support when things don’t work. You can’t simply reply with “Hey, go figure it out” and point them at a lemmy community.
In fact they address this further down:
but a lot of Linux users will see “We support xxxx” and they’ll go off and try a different distro. It’ll mostly work, but then something doesn’t, and it takes a while for us to figure out why, and then we get a lot of arguments over why their chosen distro should work, and why we should be supporting it.
no shit, that’s why you refuse support for users with unsupported configurations.
This is not a new concept.
It’s standard for big companies to say they only support RHEL or Ubuntu, in every other case you’re on your own.
Instead of axing their entire Linux support they could just do the reasonable thing, which is ignore issues that are out of scope.
Or should they support users trying to run their software on Windows 95, just because it’s still technically Windows?
There are plenty of solutions out there that are debian or RHEL only, it will work on other distributions but they aren’t supported. If you have a problem, the answer will be “Use Debian” or “Use RHEL”. And there is nothing wrong with that answer.
I appreciate they are trying to support users who are veering away from the recs, but that’s on them. As is not just using flatpak - which I personally don’t like using, but absolutely use for work/commercial software.
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