What's the reality of supporting Linux, David?

[dannytaurus]

Let's face it, this question is going straight to @David-Healey

What's the reality of providing Linux versions of my plugins? I've had a non-zero number of requests for it.

Five specific requests for Linux support ("Linux please, very buggy in wine", "Linux Mint 22.3", "Linux Mint", "Mint", "Ubuntu 24.04 LTS") and 2% of my recent survey said they run Linux as their main OS.

What do I target?
Does one Linux plugin work on multiple systems?
Does Linux have code-signing/notarisation or a convoluted mafia-style certification system, or is the Wild West?
What's the support volume of Linux users versus Mac/Win users?

[David Healey]

@dannytaurus said in What's the reality of supporting Linux, David?:

I've had a non-zero number of requests for it.

If that 2% is significant to you or you think there will be enough demand then do it. If not then I'd send a survey out in a year and see what the landscape is like then.

It's a bit of a chicken and egg thing, people won't move to Linux because some software they use isn't available, so developers don't make software for Linux because their users aren't there.

What do I target?

Debian - this is the base distro of Ubuntu and Linux Mint among many others which are very popular.

I don't support any others at the moment, but if I was going to I would look at Fedora and Arch.

Does one Linux plugin work on multiple systems?

If you build a plugin on Debian it should work on all Debian derived distros. You should use the oldest version of Debian you can in order to support as many distros. This is because dependencies get updated when distros get updated. They should all be backwards compatible for the most part but not forwards compatible.

I use Debian 11 at the moment for my build system. It's sufficiently old for wide support but new enough that I don't need any hacks to get HISE and the compile chain working.

Does Linux have code-signing/notarisation or a convoluted mafia-style certification system?

Nope :)

What's the support volume of Linux users versus Mac/Win users?

I don't think I've had a support request that was specifically about an issue with the Linux version. I just searched through my support ticket archive for Linux related keywords and found no results.

I have had a couple of people ask me about how they can compile Rhapsody on their own distros, but since your projects aren't open source that won't be a thing for you.

Linux is the least hassle platform to build for once you have it set up. I just run a script and out pops my compiled standalone and plugin bundled into an installer.

Also I have a Linux packaging workshop available.

[dannytaurus]

@David-Healey Great info. Thanks!