Taming Thermal Printers with Label Live (Electron) | Hacker News Reader

Taming Thermal Printers with Label Live (Electron)

label.live

3 pointssemireg6 comments

App developer here. :)

Long time reader. First time poster.

The Label LIVE MVP has feature-creeped along to keep pace with what I convinced myself was niche-market table stakes: barcodes, variables, spreadsheet/CSV import, full font support, built-in MQTT broker, all the printers! The big question I have is: What is the market for this kind of software? (i.e. selecting a monetization strategy)

Thank you, HN community!

Really cool concept. I particularly like the demo of the QR code feature—you don’t need a generate button since the QR code updates as you type the link. Smart UX!

Will you be releasing a Linux version?

Yes, the only reason I haven't yet is the debate around how to deploy it. I've been using Linux on the server since the late 90s but have used a Mac for the desktop since Mac OS hit X. I'm curious what packaging systems are popular for apps like this?

I've chatted a bit with David Power of Hiri and a contact at Canonical. Am I on the right track?

From what I’ve seen on your website, it looks like Label LIVE is not open source, which would mean that most Linux distros like Debian or Fedora wouldn’t package it in their native repositories.

Knowing that, I think you have two good options: provide .deb and .rpm packages for Debian and Red Hat-based systems, respectively (like Google does for Chrome), or use Snap or Flatpak, which are distro-agnostic and can be installed anywhere. In either case, users would download a file from your website or add a repository to their existing package manager and then install your program, at which point updates would be installed with either the user’s normal package manager or snap/flatpak.

This is the backend that is responsible for packaging the Mac and Windows builds.

https://www.electron.build/configuration/linux

As far as testing on the desktop - what would you consider a minimum test environment? Packaging is one thing ... but testing, that’s a whole other issue. Is it important to test on real hardware or is a VM good enough? Which desktop distros claim the most users? Asking these almost rhetorically, considering it’s my job to do the research. Any insights are greatly appreciated.

Tangentially, I’ve given some thought to supporting the RaspPi ecosystem because it’s ideal for a kiosk or bolt-on IOT print server.

That site says it’ll give you an AppImage or a Snap—I didn’t mention the AppImage format in my last post but it’s effectively like a DMG on macOS, so you just distribute the file and users only have to mark it as executable and run it.

A VM is plenty for testing that your app starts and lets you design labels fine, but you’ll be in for a world of trouble if you try interface physical hardware (like the thermal printer) from one. You could always just make a live USB of a popular distro like Ubuntu or Fedora and download and test your app on real hardware—booting Linux on a recent Mac would be a challenge so you’d want to use an older one or PC hardware for running a live USB.

Electron seems to support ARM, the processor architecture used by the RPi, so I would think you’d be good to go there aside from your app maybe being a little slow.

You will want to talk to someone else too since I’m sure I’m forgetting something, particularly about the Raspberry Pi.

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