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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Can someone familiar with the project explain why Linux support isn't available yet? I'm not familiar with how VLC's code is structured, other than a Qt-driven interface. I guess I assumed that the backend was cross-platform as well. Does the 360 degree support depend on libraries that are not yet widely available for Linux?

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It works totally fine on Linux, without any issue.

We just don't provide Linux binaries, except Ubuntu Snaps, because it is extremely difficult to do.

Just pull the code from the repo and you'll get that :)

> We just don't provide Linux binaries, except Ubuntu Snaps, because it is extremely difficult to do.

Why is it so hard? Do you mean that it would be extremely difficult to make the large number of binaries required for all the different Linux ditros?

Well, it is difficult, because for a media player, you need to have a correct video stack, (which means X11, DRI, mesa, OpenGL etc...) and a correct audio stack (which means pulseaudio) and those are quite hard to ship in a cross platform way.

If you look at the Snap packages of VLC, a LARGE part is not VLC at all, but this graphic stack.

> We just don't provide Linux binaries, except Ubuntu Snaps, because it is extremely difficult to do.

Have you considered packaging with Flatpak [0] as well? Very similar to Snaps, but it'll work with many distros instead of just Ubuntu.

[0] http://flatpak.org/

According to the Flatpak site, you have to install the Flatpak base first, which is only officially available for Fedora, Arch, and Ubuntu, with unofficial/testing/backported ports for a couple other distros. There is no source download I could find on the site, which is necessary to build it for unlisted distros like Slackware (though I suspect its strict reliance on systemd would cause issues there anyway).

This all flies in the face of their marketing statement "The days of chasing multiple Linux distributions are over"; you can't claim a one-size-fits-all system if it only fits six out of hundreds of distros.

Edit: To the downvoters, please reply instead, and tell me why you disagree with what I wrote. If I'm wrong I'll own it.

I didn't downvote you, but here's the source[1].

[1] https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak

Yep, I found the source by searching for it on Github, what I was calling out was the fact that a link to the source from the Flatpak website itself was buried at the very bottom of the "about" section where I missed it completely the first few times I went over the site. It should have been included in the "Build" or at least "Developer" section of the site.

Maybe it's just an oversight on their part, but I find the lack of any discussion of source or licensing (is it GPL, MIT, BSD?) on the site a bit of a put-off. I see from digging into the Github files it's LGPL, but why not advertise that, and the source link, more prominently on the main page? That, along with the other issue I mentioned (catering to only a few distros while claiming support for all distros) gives me pause.

> Very similar to Snaps, but it'll work with many distros instead of just Ubuntu.

Snaps run on a lot of distributions too:

https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/06/14/universal-snap-packag...

> We just don't provide Linux binaries, except Ubuntu Snaps,

You should at least mention on the site that you provide Ubuntu Snaps though.

Does the Linux version support warping scripts via OpenGL? This method has been possible for a few years : http://paulbourke.net/dome/VLCwarp/

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