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.
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.
Read the thread they said they have provided appimage for years.
Agree on the flatpak part tho, that would have solved this issue.
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.
As an extremely experienced hardware guy but only a hobby enthusiast developer, could someone explain how AppImage and Flatpak differ?
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. 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.
To our valued Linux users:
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
The LightBurn Software Team
same old excuse. all they need to do is shit out a deb and the distros can all figure out their garbage from there
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.
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.
I mean the apis are totally different on MacOS, like MacOS is not Linux by any means
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.
I don’t think they’re worried about packaging so much as the fact that what works on one distro might be mysteriously incompatible on another
I was honestly looking at one. No more.
Are there any open source alternatives?
