71–80 of 422 posts
> Target All The Linux Distributions If you are going through the trouble of targeting all Linux distributions , why not just target all platforms by using a framework like Flutter or React?
The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…
I think you're making the right decision. Open-source is extremely difficult to make even a living wage off of - the number of people who do is orders of magnitude smaller than those who make a living off of commercial software.
I hate serving shitty Google ads. They are also not a stable source of income and the revenue is low in my case. It's time for me to move on.
The problem is OSS software not even trying to compete with the market. People using OSS software taking it for granted that the UX is going to be subpar, and it really is. Regular propriety software faces the risk of their users not paying, therefore adapting to make end user experience great. OSS usually doesn't have that risk. Open source needs to be exposed to risk from end users. I tried to change that with Note…
1. I've never heard of your app, and I follow this space closely. It's extremely competitive.
2. I clicked to check how much you're asking for premium. It's reasonable on an annual basis, but I only saw an option for a monthly subscription. That's not happening.
3. I'd be more likely to give you a donation than to pay for a premium version for an app like this. That model has worked well for Obsidian. I don't think getting early access to features is worth much, but a lot of people have paid them to support their work.
4. My observation is that a closed core product with a large open source ecosystem around it gives folks a reason to pay.
This has always been an issue for Linux adoption. Somebody I know (not in tech) wanted to switch from Windows to Linux and I said: "Which one?" It's the same as Mastodon. "Which instance?" The answer is usually the biggest / most popular instance or distro, but not many applications the masses use are on Linux, the same as there is not many interesting people on Mastodon for people to switch over to it. Applications…
The vast majority of Desktop users just use Debian or Debian-based distros like Ubuntu, Linux Mint and so on.
So in the end, it is just a matter of whatever pre-installed software you get. It used to be that vanilla Debian was a bit hard to use but I don't think that is true anymore. (Though I still recommend Linux Mint for the absolute "just works" experience.)
For 90% of users, they are not going wrong using Debian or one of the popular Debian-based distros. After that is is basically just a matter of specialized needs.
Want to make administering your system a hobby and part of your personality? Have some Arch.
Need professional support? OpenSuse.
Need reproducible builds? Nix/Guix.
Need a minimalist distro that runts on potatoes? Puppy Linux and whatever else.
Wayland vs X11? Systemd? If you know these words, you are already way too deep in the rabbit hole.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're making the right decision. Open-source is extremely difficult to make even a living wage off of - the number of people who do is orders of magnitude smaller than those who make a living off of commercial software.
>Open-source is extremely difficult to make even a living wage off of… So are you saying it’s even possible? I wish to learn at least one option to do it. Few is even better. How at all you can realistically make living this way? Ok, not living , just partial income. Ok not partial. Some income? I am not making fun of I honestly look some way . I understand that if you maintain 10 years some essential part of essenti…
I think there's a common misconception that if the developers of ten similar apps would just pool their resources, then one great app would result. Fragmentation certainly can be a problem but I feel like this is some kind of corollary to the mythical man-month.
I think the premise is wrong when there still doesn’t exist a core set of frameworks that are abi stable on Linux. On competing platforms there are way more frameworks out of the box (CoreImage, CoreAudio, CodeML, SceneKit, AppKit, etc) and they don’t break as often. I know in Linux they have fun things like snap and flatpak but it is really solving the problem using a bit of infrastructure and package management ins…
https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Glibc%20Timeline
Of course normal game devs have not the slightest idea of those issues, and even so, they won't do it because it is a pain, that for 1% of their market. Not to mention they better statically link libgcc (and libstdc++ if they use c++) to avoid the ABI issues of those abominations (the word is fair) which have been plagging game binaries for TEN F.... YEARS ! (getting better has more and more game binaries default to -static-libgcc and -static-libstdc++, if c++, gcc/clang options).
There is light at the end of the tunnel though as godot engine is providing build containers which are very careful of all that (unity seems clean there too, dunno for UT5.x though).
But you have engines really not ready, for instance electron based games: you don't have the right version of the GTK+ toolkit installed on your enlightenment/Qt/raw X11/wayland/etc distro? Nah, won't run. And packaging properly a full google blink engine for binary distribution targetting a wide spectum of elf/linux distros? Yeah... good luck with that.
elf/linux is hostile to anything binary only, that due to manic ABI breakage all over the board, all the time (accute in the SDK and core libs).
If it is already that hard for game binaries, good luck with apps. I can hear already their devs saying: "we don't care, just use and install microsoft suze gnu/linux, every else is unsupported"... I think you get the picture where all that is going.