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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

What’s funny is that I’m certain that the vast majority of Linux users who were paying for this were trying really hard to watch these shows legitimately, and almost all of them will be antagonised by this and just download torrents or similar.

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Odd for a big company like HBO to throw away hundreds of dollars of revenue just like that

What happens when Linux users tell their Windows/Mac friends "Hey, I've got all of $SHOW downloaded, want it?".

Nobody does that anymore. It's "Hey, I got $SHOW on my plex server, want an invite?"

It's almost time for Plex to die, then.

What's the new hotness, is Emby dope yet?

There is a free fork of Emby called Jellyfin that has replaced Plex for me.

https://jellyfin.org/

True that.

Along the same line I went back to pirating after all the companies started pulling their stuff off Netflix in favor of standing up their own services. I tried. But fine have it your way, back to getting none of my money.

How are you in the "right" here ? You're stealing a product and acting as if it's cool.

I didn't say I was in the right, nor do I think I'm cool. It's just reality that when artificial roadblocks make something more difficult than it should be people find a way around them.

Copying isn't stealing. Without Linux support I wouldn't buy the product anyway.

It increasingly seems to be only valve who understand that piracy occurs because of friction rather than price (for media like games and TV at least).

I pirate quite a lot of games but if they're good I'm more than happy to buy it so I get multiplayer and cloud saves etc.

Pirating games seems like a terrible deal when you consider the viruses, bot nets and bitcoin mining malware.

If you've ever contracted malware in any shape through piracy, you've been doing it wrong. Public torrent trackers are fine. The existence of various Scene indexing sites [0] allows you to verify a release before you download it.

[0]: Like https://predb.me/ or https://www.xrel.to/releases.html

Those problems are almost nonexistent if you get past the public torrent sites. Lots and lots of impostor sites and users though, I assume most of it automated.

The bitcoin mining problem is seeping into even free-to-play game markets, which I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, it's at least better than the corrosive influence of advertising.

Only if you don't know what you're doing.

There is this thing called the scene and verification files.

Sadly enough, steam games have begun to pull out Mac support (Apple deprecated major API) soon after games started porting to Mac.

Even Steam cannot get games to support a platform, if the platform doesn't help it.

Pretty sure it cost them more to keep the service up for linuxes than they got from the people using it.

But... why? What is the cost here?

Developer hours (and SRE + admin hours!) to maintain.

I'm not understanding. Why is the OS a concern of this browser-based streaming application?

I don't know anything about cross-platform support, so clearly I'm missing something. Is it cross-platform DRM? I'm admittedly ignorant about this stuff.

Were they charging Linux users less? I imagine that there is an order of magnitude more MacOS users compared to Linux. How many users does it take to break even with streaming?

What’s also funny is that if they just use the right abstraction layers developing for Linux shouldn’t be much more effort than for Mac

They already are, it's the browser…

This is likely intentional user-agent filtering rather than any browser feature support issue. Linux is a first class platform for Chrome. Chase (the bank) does something similar.

Mac is one platform. Linux is tens of different operating systems.

If only there were some kind of platform agnostic hypertext language that could be used here so that vendors didn't need to care about the details of the user's operating system.

I can hardly get web developers to test on another browser than Chrome, I can't imagine what it will take to get them to test on another OS.

If none of the web devs at a big company like HBO use Linux as their daily driver (at least at home), I’d be very surprised...

My point was that it shouldn't matter which user agent you use; they should all implement the standards.

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