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Lightburn laser cutting software is killing linux support.

As a advid user of lightburn for my business, this truely saddens me.

I loved being able to have the freedom to run linux and have 1st class support.

Lightburn states in this post, about how linux is less than 1℅ of there users. They also state it costs lots of money and time to develop for each distribution. To which i gotta ask WHY not just make a flatpak or distribute source to let the community package it. Like its kinda dumb to kill it off ive been using zoronOS for 3 years running my laser cutter! And it works bloody great!!! The last version for linux will be 1.7 which will continue to work forever with a valid liscence. I do not plan to switch back to windows spyware or MAC overpriced Unix. I hope the people at lightburn reconsider in the future, There software is the best software for laser cutters period. And when buying my laser cutter (60watt omtech) i went out of my way to buy one with a rudia controller as it is compatible with lightburn.

–edit just got the email this is what they sent

"To our valued Linux users:

After a great deal of internal discussion, we have made the difficult decision to sunset Linux support following the upcoming release of LightBurn 1.7.00.

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.

The unfortunate reality is that Linux users make up only 1% of our overall user base, but providing and supporting Linux-compatible builds takes up as much or more time as does providing them for Windows and Mac OS.

The segmentation of Linux distributions complicates these burdens further — we’ve had to provide three separate packages for the versions of Linux we officially support, and still encounter frequent compatibility issues on those distributions (or closely related distributions), to say nothing of the many distributions we have been asked to support.

Finally, we will soon begin building LightBurn on a new framework that will require our development team to write custom libraries for each platform we support. This will be a significant undertaking and, regrettably, it is simply not tenable to invest our team’s time into an effort that will impact such a small portion of our user base. Such challenges will only continue to arise as we work to expand LightBurn’s capabilities going forward.

We understand that our Linux users will be disappointed by this decision. We appreciate all of our users, and assure you that your existing license will still work with any version of LightBurn for which your license term is valid, up until LightBurn version 1.7.00, forever. Prior releases will always be made available for download. Finally, your license will continue to be valid for future Windows and Mac OS releases covered by your license term.

If you are a Linux-only user who has recently purchased a license or renewal that is valid for a release of LightBurn after v1.7.00, please contact us for a refund.

Rest assured that we will be using the time gained by sunsetting Linux support to redouble our efforts at making better software for laser cutters, and beyond. We hope you will continue to utilize LightBurn on a supported operating system going forward, and we thank you for being a part of the LightBurn community.

Sincerely,

The LightBurn Software Team

Copyright © 2024 LightBurn Software. All rights reserved. "

I appreciate that there willing to refund recently bought liscences and all versions up to 1.7 forever instead of DRM bullshit (you gotta buy the newest subscription service) {insert cable guys from southpark} But if your rewriting the framework then why kill off linux??? They said there working on a native arm build for MacOS which knowing apple your gonna half to buy the new macbook cause the old one is old and apple needs your money. So its not anymore of a reason to kill linux

TLDR: there killing linux support because its less than 1% of there userbase and they spend more money and time maintaining the lightburn build.

greybeard ,

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.

nickwitha_k ,

What FOSS alternatives exist? This is exactly the reason not to rely on closed-source for hardware support.

g5pw ,

There’s LaserWeb but apparently it doesn’t support closed source (Chinese) firmware so you’d need to change your laser’s controller…

EddyBot ,

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

bummer

transientpunk ,
@transientpunk@sh.itjust.works avatar

To our valued Linux users:

Fuck you.

Sincerely,

The LightBurn Software Team

communism ,
@communism@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

rem26_art ,
@rem26_art@fedia.io avatar

Man i was literally looking into laser cutters like 2 days ago and saw that Lightburn supported Linux. Guess that was short lived.

kent_eh ,

The only reason I paid for Lightburn in the first place is because it’s the only even slightly mature laser software that supports Linux.

Given this news, what are our options?

LagerGRBL seems to be open source, but nobody packages that for Linux as far as I can tell.

And I wasn’t able to find anything else when I was looking last year.

kitnaht ,

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.

vapeloki ,

This does not help with Ruida Controllers and fiber Lasers. Both things I have at my company and we don’t have any Windows System.

That is such a shame. And since we need to talk over usb, wine will not work either 😞

possiblylinux127 ,

Reverse engineers have entered the chat

rand_alpha19 ,

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.

Sanguine ,

Read the thread they said they have provided appimage for years.

Agree on the flatpak part tho, that would have solved this issue.

rand_alpha19 ,

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.

Sanguine ,

No idea, not the Dev and dont even know what product this is lol… Go read the thread 🤙

utopiah ,

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.

mactan ,

same old excuse. all they need to do is shit out a deb and the distros can all figure out their garbage from there

Telorand ,

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.

makingStuffForFun ,
@makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml avatar

I was honestly looking at one. No more.

Are there any open source alternatives?

7eter ,

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

krolden ,
@krolden@lemmy.ml avatar

What dumb reasoning

atzanteol ,

They’re all valid reasons…

Steamymoomilk OP ,

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!

krolden ,
@krolden@lemmy.ml avatar

Them saying they have to support 200 distros is just nonsense

sanpo ,

But they’re not - it’s the same old, tired excuse that was never true.

“Too many different distros” was never really a good argument.
Just support one and users will figure it out, like we always do.

Furycd001 ,
@Furycd001@fosstodon.org avatar

@sanpo @atzanteol We always figure something out (^~^)

atzanteol ,

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.

sanpo ,

users expect support when things don’t work

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?

curbstickle ,

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.

cmnybo ,

There is no reason to support all distros. They already have an appimage, they could have dropped support for everything but that.

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