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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Doubtful. I work for a major Dropbox competitor and we don't have any Linux support. We aren't loosing any sales over Linux, nor are we under any pressure for Linux support.

Typically Linux support in products like this is organic: It happens when the engineers themselves use Linux and push upwards to support it.

Anyway, with the amount of testing and verification we do on our product, desktop Linux is impractical. We try to verify on as many possible user configurations as possible. (Multiple Windows versions, 32-bit and 64-bit, Multiple Mac versions, remote desktop, ect). Linux is so heterogeneous that we could only really support it if it was a large customer where we targeted their typical configurations.

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Not sure who you work for, but I'm going to talk about Box since that is the competitor I'm familiar with. I'm in academia and to my annoyance have to interact with Box which has no linux support (and has also deprecated existing workarounds like WebDAV).

It's frustrating to me because academia is a major target for Box, and there are many of us linux users here. I wish the university admins that negotiate these deals would consider us.

It also feels like Box has a dismissive attitude towards us. Linux support has been a much requested feature for a long time, for example see this years-long thread: https://community.box.com/t5/Desktop-and-Mobile-Forum/Status.... IIRC mods encouraged people to vote for this feature request in BoxPulse, where it subsequently became one of the highest-voted features, but then labeled WONTFIX. Also annoying that Box supports linux-based Android, and also supported the less-used Windows phone. Yes there are a lot of linux distros out there, but Box could put out a snap, or just target one distro and let the other distros patch for themselves (like Steam does).

The problem with supporting Linux, for commercial desktop software, is that it's extremely heterogeneous. Some user might be on Ubuntu, another on Redhat, another on Mandrake; all with very different details.

Thus, what happens is that so-and-so runs such-and-such which happens to be incompatible because of some whacky configuration alignment that no one considered.

The test matrix then becomes much more complicated than a traditional test matrix targeting common Windows and Mac configurations.

That's fine for expensive software where the end user might have a very close relationship with the vendor, but for "cheap" software the cost of supporting every possible way someone configured their computer is significantly higher than targeting Windows and Mac.

(Otherwise, the Linux version of a program might cost 2-10x what a Windows or Mac version will cost.)

I like to think of desktop Linux as a DIY hobby; but not something that you can expect commercial software vendors to support.

If you are targeting businesses, virtually nobody will run Mandrake (which does not exist anymore), Mandriva, Arch, or whatever. When you target Ubuntu LTS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you have probably covered most of the enterprise user base.

(Otherwise, the Linux version of a program might cost 2-10x what a Windows or Mac version will cost.)

This surprises me, because Apple changes and breaks a lot of stuff every macOS release and Apple only supports one or two versions back for security updates. In the meanwhile, RHEL only releases every half-decade or so and supports every release for much longer. Ubuntu LTSes are only released every two years and are then more or less frozen as well.

I like to think of desktop Linux as a DIY hobby; but not something that you can expect commercial software vendors to support.

Except if you care about servers. Or developers for that matter.

The key word is "Desktop"

In an enterprise, even Linux on the desktop is standardized and you’re likely to find that the LTS options (Ubuntu LTS or RHEL) will cover most of the Linux users. And those that aren’t covered are probably used to finding their own way, if given the appropriate tools.

Sure, for everyday end users, supporting Linux can be a pain, but if we’re still talking Enterprise, there are only a few distros that would need to be covered.

Dropbox works on a server. I know companies that picked it because of that.

>I like to think of desktop Linux as a DIY hobby; but not something that you can expect commercial software vendors to support.

I don't use desktop Linux myself and I'm not usually a desktop Linux advocate at all, but I know that a lot of developers use desktop Linux professionally for good reason. Public administration in Europe is also very gradually moving towards using more Linux on the desktop (in spite of well publicised setbacks). There is a lot of public pressure in that direction.

Desktop Linux may not be important now, but it probably has more growth potential than anything else. And if it grows even just a little bit, the impact on Windows/Mac-only cloud solutions will be disproportionate. It doesn't take a huge percentage of Linux desktops to make Windows/Mac-only cloud solutions very cumbersome.

I think it's a smart move by Dropbox to occupy that niche now, even if it's loss making. There could even be a bit of a moat, because Microsoft and Google both have reasons (Windows/Chrome OS) to drag their feet.

Yes, I have a "free" "unlimited" Box storage via UChicago but I never think to use it since I'm a Linux user and it's such a pain to use from the browser. Supporting Ubuntu and EL would support the vast majority of users on campus.

Is it a reasonable alternative to say linux is supported, but only on specific filesystems?

Here's info on how to build the CLI on linux

https://github.com/box/boxcli/issues/55

Box launched a CLI recently. Not a full client, but it's something

https://developer.box.com/docs/box-cli

As a Linux and MacOS user I would never recommend a solution that does not work on Linux, unless it's effectively a free complement to something else the company is paying for.

As a Dropbox competitor I know that you've lost at least a couple of sales because with all the companies I worked thus far the only sync solutions used at the company level are Dropbox and Google Drive. And the later is only used because it's attached to Google Suite, but nobody pays for extra storage.

And all the companies I worked with have some Linux users. And I know, correlation is not causation, but I know that at least one of those companies haven't gone with Box because of missing Linux support.

If you haven't noticed lost sales it might be because companies with Linux users aren't even bothering to check you out.

We support Mac. That's rather challenging because Mac users are a minority, yet Mac development tends to be more expensive.

> We aren't loosing any sales over Linux

How would you know if you were?

It's shorthand for, "We might be losing sales, but we assume they're a negligible amount of total potential revenue", which is a fair assumption to make.

“We decided to go with <other vendor> because they have Linux support”

“The sales team says that's a requirement for the companies they're talking to”

“Competitor X has Linux support and they're growing faster with no other obvious explanation”

Most customers never contact your sales team in the first place if they see that you do not support their stuff.

This very much depends on the product but note that is exactly why I listed other possibilities. If Linux support was a big opportunity they’d know — maybe not precisely but enough to know it was hurting them.

I’ve been using Linux for around 25 years, some of that selling commercial software and most buying. There’s a very noisy contingent of the community who make a lot of noise but never actually buy anything. You’ll go broke chasing their feature requests because there’s always one more thing before they can switch.

In enterprise sales, there's often a huge disconnect between who you're selling to, and who is actually using the product.

In which context it might actually be perfectly correct to say that you aren't losing any sales over it, even if there are thousands of users who would use Linux support, were it there.

Anyway, with the amount of testing and verification we do on our product, desktop Linux is impractical.

And yet, there are many open source projects have the scale of a file synchronization tool or larger, that manage to work fine (and run a large battery of tests) across different Linux distributions, BSDs, and macOS.

I don't think it is impractical, it is probably just not a good business case.

(I don't necessarily agree, I think Linux users will typically send more fine-grained and useful bug reports and might help you shake out bugs more quickly.)

I'm sure you don't lose a significant number of sales over Linux. The number of sales could probably be smaller than statistical error, and I think your company made the right decision.

But using 'any' as an universal quantification is false, because some users like me are paying for products like pCloud precisely because they support Linux.

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