Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#201

Post by dmurray » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #167

TuringTest wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please, don't act as if "fundamentalist" didn't have negative connotations in English. Fundamentalist Christians may decide to identify themselves with that word, but I've never heard of a FLOSS group calling themselves "Fundamentalist Open-Sourcers". Besides, the insult was not merely in that term, but also considering a "problem" (for him, maybe!) that some Linux users may want to keep their systems pure in term…

> Oh please, don't act as if "fundamentalist" didn't have negative connotations in English. You may have misunderstood my point. Based on the assumption that the OP wants to avoid unintended insults, I was pointing out the issues one could associate with using "fundamentalist" as a term of derision. I'm not trying to play PC-police. I was just raising the point in case the OP would want to know. tl;dr There are many…

Is "vandal" really politically incorrect these days? As far as I can tell from Wikipedia the Vandal people have died out and there is no one left to take offence from having their ethnic name associated with property damage.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#202

Post by makmanalp » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:38 PM UTC

endless1234 wrote: post #129

amelius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but unless the distribution problem is solved Not sure what you mean. The distribution problem is solved by the internet. Discoverability (probably what you meant) is solved redundantly by Medium, since it is already solved by Google, and by social news websites such as HN and Reddit, etc. Medium = YouTube for textual content. The only way we "need" it is if we want a feed of algorithmically chosen content based on…

>Medium = YouTube for textual content. The only way we "need" it is if we want a feed of algorithmically chosen content based on previous/popular preference Are you saying this is a bad thing in and of itself? Ok, sometimes I binge on videos needlessly, but to say the distribution/discoverability is already solved by the internet and Google is probably not how most people see it. Being recommended new content to cons…

This is exactly my point. Saying google solves the discoverability problem in this manner is obtuse - it's not the same thing as looking for a specific thing. If you want to make discovering new content that you might like in a decentralized manner easy, then great! I'm sure people will be excited about that. Currently though, medium does that to the first approximation.

Also, social news websites require effort to post on, and often the content that gets upvoted is the lowest common denominator of the interests of the people who currently happen to be staring at the site, rather than each person getting their own set of new content.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#203

Post by ekianjo » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:39 PM UTC

megaman22 wrote: post #59

ekianjo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do users have to do something to fix something that needs to be fixed by publishers?

Fortunately, you can use user stylesheets to fix some of this crap. Holding your breath waiting for somebody else, particularly publishers, to fix it for you is a good recipe for asphyxiation.

You could start by not reading anything on Medium. That works, too.

Imagine if you start having extensions for every third site out there. It's a never ending problem.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#204

Post by dogma1138 » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:48 PM UTC

dpower wrote: post #168

magduf wrote: post #72

The big thing I see missing from all this analysis is the home vs. work distinction. You have people saying "Linux users choose FLOSS because of philosophy, and proprietary software goes against this", you have users saying "I'd have tried it if it were FLOSS and I could just download it and try it", etc., but the problem is: this is a product for working with an Exchange server. How many individual users have a need…

Hi there, I'm the author of the blog post. Some context you may find interesting, and maybe I should do a follow up post about this. We were very enterprise focused, but it just didn't work. We were trying to displace MS Outlook. And unfortunately, most people want to stick with Outlook. Not because it's better, but because it's what they know. We found that even if we convinced 8 out of 10 people in a company to buy…

Honestly while it might sounds like I’m speaking out of my ass that’s a bad business model.

Outlook is one of the best mail clients out there, not many can disagree about that.

The Office 365 web client is nearly identical these days and it runs in the browser.

You aren’t going to out Office Microsoft that is just a fools errand.

You can maybe focus on better mail clients for the desktop but there are quite a few good ones already yes they don’t work with Exchange out of the box but with IMAP and exchange connectors many of them do.

Also by essentially building a client for Exchange you are putting your product at the mercy of Microsoft that can change their APIs and protocol on a whim and even block 3rd party clients with their EULA all together.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#205

Post by bachmeier » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

Nice: half price offer

Not so nice: expires in about three hours so you give up the ability to try the software first

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#206

Post by greenhatman » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #2

Quite a neat insight and somewhat confirming what I think personally; Linux users largely don't use Linux for FLOSS reasons. People who do use Linux for FLOSS reasons are however rather loud. I would probably not be wrong when saying that most Linux users will happily pay a developer for the binary of an application if the dev is "doing it right". Doing it right largely involves "don't treat the customer as a walking…

I use it partly for FLOSS reasons. But I'm not an absolutist. I still pay for JetBrains IDEs, and I pay for Mailspring (https://getmailspring.com/), among others.

FLOSS is also arguably more important in some software. OS is most important. Technically IDEs are very important too, but there just isn't an open source alternative for JetBrains IDEs. And they definitely deserve the money.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#207

Post by turbinerneiter » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

Did anyone in here actually try?

I installed the snap, from there on it went downhill:

* after start, I get "Nouveau is known to cause crashes" -> restart for fixed rendering

* after I login, there are no mails showing up, but there is also no "Something went wrong with your login"

* when I click on the calendar, there is a "Sorry. We are unable to load your calendar"

* when I try to send mail: "Yikes, something went wrong."

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#208

Post by thepumpkin1979 » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

Separo wrote: post #124

If Sketch was available on Ubuntu I'd switch.

There’s a bigger chance Figma comes to Linux faster than Sketch, Figma since is based on Electron. Sketch is heavily dependent on Cocoa and Mac.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#209

Post by abeyer » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:05 PM UTC

18pfsmt wrote: post #193

johnvanommen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 95% of the work that I do is on Linux. But I run a Windows laptop. Why? Because of the Outlook Calendar. It's kind of amazing that so many tech companies run on Linux, but the Outlook Calendar just won't go away. Nearly everything else in Windows I can replicate in Linux; Excel Spreadsheets, Microsoft Word, they all have Linux equivalents. But Calendar? Nope. I've seen solutions online, and I tried them, but no…

The relevant add-ons are Lightning and Exchange Calendar https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/addon/lightning/ https://github.com/ExchangeCalendar/exchangecalendar/

Is there mail client integration now, too?

That was the big missing link the last time I tried them... the inability to accept and/or reply on meeting invites and handle both the email and the calendar part. I was always able to view my calendar from linux, and could even edit/update personal calendar events, but I always had to fall back to windows or web to handle meeting invites. Pretty much everyone who uses O365 calendar is going to be using emailed invites and they need to work to make this a solution, but I never saw much traction on addressing that issue.

Re: Our experience launching a paid, proprietary product on Linux

#210

Post by mattl » Mon, Jul 23, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

dpower wrote: post #168

magduf wrote: post #72

The big thing I see missing from all this analysis is the home vs. work distinction. You have people saying "Linux users choose FLOSS because of philosophy, and proprietary software goes against this", you have users saying "I'd have tried it if it were FLOSS and I could just download it and try it", etc., but the problem is: this is a product for working with an Exchange server. How many individual users have a need…

Hi there, I'm the author of the blog post. Some context you may find interesting, and maybe I should do a follow up post about this. We were very enterprise focused, but it just didn't work. We were trying to displace MS Outlook. And unfortunately, most people want to stick with Outlook. Not because it's better, but because it's what they know. We found that even if we convinced 8 out of 10 people in a company to buy…

> Unfortunately, the fundamentalist FOSS mentality we encountered on Reddit is still alive and well.

This is incredibly rude. You may not like it, but GNU/Linux was built by people for user freedom, not for proprietary email clients.

Instead of using words like “fundamentalist” please instead consider that you are doing something that is not welcomed by the creators of the operating system and a large number of the long-term users.

A little understanding would go a long way.