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.
TLDR: there killing linux support because its less than 1% of there userbase and they spend more money and time maintaining the lightburn build.
Yeah they never were great at Linux support anyway. About 6 years ago I had to teach them that LTS distros like Ubuntu stay on old versions of packages. At the time they built their Linux-x64.deb against Ubuntu 18.04 when Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.0x and thus everything from Mint 17 and on were still under LTS and so a lot of installs out there would see a dependency error.
This is definitely where Flatpak or even Appimage is the real solution.
Well it seems to be time to make a FOSS laser engraver app. Never did really like LaserWeb.
Man i was literally looking into laser cutters like 2 days ago and saw that Lightburn supported Linux. Guess that was short lived.
What dumb reasoning
They’re all valid reasons…
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!
Them saying they have to support 200 distros is just nonsense
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.@sanpo @atzanteol We always figure something out (~)
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.
With my incredibly limited knowledge of the system, it feels like Flatpak would be a solution to this, right? Or are they too isolated to support a printing system?
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?
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.
There is no reason to support all distros. They already have an appimage, they could have dropped support for everything but that.
Honestly they should just make it work in wine.
To our valued Linux users:
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
The LightBurn Software Team
Oooo I didn’t know Lemmy had automatic translation lol.
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 funbummer
What FOSS alternatives exist? This is exactly the reason not to rely on closed-source for hardware support.
There’s LaserWeb but apparently it doesn’t support closed source (Chinese) firmware so you’d need to change your laser’s controller…
Might be worth doing some file analysis. The big CO2 laser at my Makerspace has a “proprietary” format that is really just PostScript. Working around that stuff should be doable.
With proprietary software, there’s always a chance they’ll pull the rug out from under you.
…as opposed to open source software, which will be maintained and updated forever, and there will always be people to work on it for free. /s
See, here’s the thing about open source, you have the source. You can always compile a discontinued program. You can even update the code if you want. No one can say “You can’t run it anymore”. I can grab Linux Kernel 0.01 and still compile it. No one will stop me. No one!
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.
Indeed, this would be nice to see. For me, the problem is really that LightBurn is over kill, for a cheap basic machine, you really don’t need half of what it offers. Heck, I’d love to see an Android software for lasers, and am surprised that hasn’t happened yet.
Guess you don’t want any Swiss government contracts
So all the people still dumb enough to use windows and mac are making companies leave linux
I think this is a bad take, a take that assumes one is superior for using Linux over proprietary alternatives
No that’s true, open source is superior is proprietary
free & open source model is superior to proprietary, especially for users, and for long term. (funding the dev part is a crazy hard problem, to be fair, but that’s true for anything that should benefit users, including roads and health care)
but the point was that the “people still dumb” take assumes that Linux users are superior, which is a bunch of childish BS of course (wasn’t probably even meant seriously)
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
Flatpack it. Done.
Exactly
LightBurn should hire better developers then
But how can they give raises to their execs then?! Think of the poor C-Suite!
It sounds like they’re going to rewrite a bunch of code and decided to not invest the capital into Linux.
That’s a strange problem to have these days since libraries like this are often designed to run on all platforms, but what do I know.
But if it’s true that fewer than 1% of users are on Linux and it’s costing them more than other platforms, it makes no financial sense to keep it going.
I’m no business man (far from that), but 1% sounds like more than 0. (Technically, 1% also tells us nothing about how much money that is.)
Also, “1% of users” is one way of looking at it, but if it’s killing 1 of 3 major platforms does not seem like a good default strategic move. Things can change (and are changing) so next time MS does something to f* with their users, I think it can be a good move to be on the user’s side, not a major OS’s side. (And I don’t know anything about laser-cutting communities, but I would guess it has more than average share of creative and tech-savvy people who also like (or need) to have good control of their tech – I mean, this ain’t no spreadsheet app.)
Again, I have no idea what it takes to make laser-cutting SW work, but simple short-sighted common sense seems like a poor excuse.
I have no horse in this race (I barely know what laser-cutting is—I do know a bunch about rpm and deb packaging, FWIW) but I suppose the real reason is on the other side of the equation. But it seems they have to be doing something wrong for it to cost so much that they’re willing to go, shrug, and pull their foot back out of the door. (Or they really just thought about the simple maths, and someone felt smart and brave to have do the painful decision.)
By the way, and this is 100% speculation, that “something” could have been an old dependency and/or architectural decision, so if your guess is right, there would probably be no better time to fix it than now.
I was honestly looking at one. No more.
Are there any open source alternatives?
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
