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.
They mention retooling to another library. I’m guessing they’re doing a UI rewrite and the chosen library isn’t Linux compatible. Since saying that will obviously bring valid criticisms of “why not choose a better library?”, they choose to blame something else. And the reason they chose that library is likely because of office politics rather than technical.
From my very basic understanding (I have only been using Linux since December), AppImages are single-file executables (kind of like a portable application) whereas Flatpaks are somewhat "distro-agnostic" packages that are sandboxed by default. They're sort of different ways of trying to solve the cross-distribution compatibility issue.
I like Flatpak better on desktop just because it's sandboxed and creates a menu entry automatically without me having to. It's generally easier to update a Flatpak too, but a dev could implement an auto-updater in an AppImage release if they wanted to. IMO, when a Flatpak isn't available, AppImages are fine, and you can extract the files from them with the --appimage-extract argument if you want to see what's in there or edit a config.
Tell me you are too oblivious to implement CI/CD without telling me you’re too oblivious to to implement CI/CD. Their builds and packaging should have been fully automated if it was such a pain. If you can make a Mac version of any software, you can make a Linux version. The debate internally was likely management being dumb as rocks and overruling anyone who actually knows anything.
Sure, but the CI/CD pipeline would take care of that for you for every single build. You build the pipeline once and then forget about it until Apple makes some breaking change. Meanwhile, you push the code to your repository one time and watch as the machine automatically builds all 50 installers for you in one go AND publishes them for you without having to lift a finger.
As someone who’s written pipelines who do exactly that on Windows, macOS, Linux across x86_64, aarch64, and MIPS, with optimized, unoptimized, instrumented for ASAN, instrumented for TSAN, and instrumented for coverage, and does it all in a distributed containerized workflow… It’s not as easy as it sounds. Honestly macOS is way more of a hassle to deal with than Linux.
Unless you need ROS. ROS is utter garbage. ROS is popular in robots. ROS is, unlike its name, not actually an operating system but rather a system of tools and utilities which do not follow any standards and certainly not the OS standards. I literally hate ROS. I would burn that shit to the ground and rebuild-the-world if I had the time to.
See, here’s the thing about open source, you have the source. You can always compile a discontinued program. You can even update the code if you want. No one can say “You can’t run it anymore”. I can grab Linux Kernel 0.01 and still compile it. No one will stop me. No one!
That’s only true in theory, and if you are actually capable of doing that.
The reality is that most software was already barely working when it was written, it’s poorly documented and if you try to work on it without any help you might as well write it on your own from scratch.
You will also encounter incompatibilities, missing dependencies, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I love FOSS, I know all the advantages and it’s definitely better than the alternative. But it’s also not a silver bullet. Though this case is pretty cut and dry.
There = over there, that place, rather than here. Also, “There will be time. There are no peaches now. There, there… don’t worry.”
Their = in the possession of them, belonging to them.
They’re = they are.
“They’re going to take their business to the store over there; across the street. There will be no other choice.”
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.
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.
With my incredibly limited knowledge of the system, it feels like Flatpak would be a solution to this, right? Or are they too isolated to support a printing system?
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.
free & open source model is superior to proprietary, especially for users, and for long term. (funding the dev part is a crazy hard problem, to be fair, but that’s true for anything that should benefit users, including roads and health care)
but the point was that the “people still dumb” take assumes that Linux users are superior, which is a bunch of childish BS of course (wasn’t probably even meant seriously)
It sounds like they’re going to rewrite a bunch of code and decided to not invest the capital into Linux.
That’s a strange problem to have these days since libraries like this are often designed to run on all platforms, but what do I know.
But if it’s true that fewer than 1% of users are on Linux and it’s costing them more than other platforms, it makes no financial sense to keep it going.
I’m no business man (far from that), but 1% sounds like more than 0. (Technically, 1% also tells us nothing about how much money that is.)
Also, “1% of users” is one way of looking at it, but if it’s killing 1 of 3 major platforms does not seem like a good default strategic move. Things can change (and are changing) so next time MS does something to f* with their users, I think it can be a good move to be on the user’s side, not a major OS’s side. (And I don’t know anything about laser-cutting communities, but I would guess it has more than average share of creative and tech-savvy people who also like (or need) to have good control of their tech – I mean, this ain’t no spreadsheet app.)
Again, I have no idea what it takes to make laser-cutting SW work, but simple short-sighted common sense seems like a poor excuse.
I have no horse in this race (I barely know what laser-cutting is—I do know a bunch about rpm and deb packaging, FWIW) but I suppose the real reason is on the other side of the equation. But it seems they have to be doing something wrong for it to cost so much that they’re willing to go, shrug, and pull their foot back out of the door. (Or they really just thought about the simple maths, and someone felt smart and brave to have do the painful decision.)
By the way, and this is 100% speculation, that “something” could have been an old dependency and/or architectural decision, so if your guess is right, there would probably be no better time to fix it than now.
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.
Indeed, this would be nice to see. For me, the problem is really that LightBurn is over kill, for a cheap basic machine, you really don’t need half of what it offers. Heck, I’d love to see an Android software for lasers, and am surprised that hasn’t happened yet.
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.
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