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Comment by burtonator | Hacker News Reader

I'm about to get downvoted to oblivion but the solution here is don't sell apps on Linux.

People on Linux don't pay for apps. Target a platform like iOS where users are willing to pay for apps. 85% of total app store volume across iOS and Android is from iOS.

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Not going to downvote you, but if you are downvoted it's probably because this isn't true. Take the video game market as an example; people are very much willing to pay for video games on Linux (via Humble Bundle, Itch, Steam, or GoG) even when the games are usually DRM-free and could trivially be pirated.

If there's not much of a market in other areas, then frankly I'd have to say it's because the open source ecosystem is simply too good on Linux. There's already an app that can do what you want for 99% of use cases, and it's open source and free. Hard to compete with that. You wouldn't criticize Windows because someone can't find anyone to buy their web browser; Linux is like that, just for most every application.

It is hardly enough to sustain a business, the other platforms are the ones that keep the lights on.

I largely agree with this. LibreOffice is great, Octave is great, Firefox / Chrome, GIMP, etc.

There are already a ton of free and great applications on Linux.

JetBrains does about $300M annual revenue, and a substantial portion of that is from Linux users. Clearly people on Linux do pay for desktop apps if they offer enough value.

I would love to see the actual numbers there. JetBrains uses Java for Windows/MacOS portability, so the marginal cost of supporting Linux is negligible. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual Linux revenue for them is about 1-5%.

About half of the users of JetBrains Software have a development environment on linux (beating MacOS). And about 60% of the projects that the developers code are being targeted for linux (presumably for Servers, but still a lot) Source: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2020/

Sure, but about 90% of their userbase is happy with the free community edition and will never upgrade. What is more interesting is the distribution of the remaining 10%.

The Humble Bundle used to release actual numbers. For sales that offered games on Linux, Linux users accounted for around 20% of revenue, often beating out Mac. Interestingly enough, for sales that only offer Windows-only games, Linux revenue still reaches 1-5%.

https://cheesetalks.net/humble/

I'm not a Linux user because it does cost me nothing. I even have a couple of unused Win Pro licences around here. I'm a Linux user because I like my private freedom.

Heavy Linux user here, and I'm more than willing to pay for good software that provides a vital service for me. That being said, there definitely is a fine line, as if the software doesn't provide value over a similar oss/foss tool, then it's not justifying it's price.

PyCharm is a well-know paid software that has a strong Linux/OSX presence, as well as almost all other JetBrains software. Sublime Text is another.

I've been using Linux on the desktop forever. Today, I mainly use Pop! Os.

Anddddd, I've happily bought and use paid software on Linux all the time! I play Steam games, use InSync (a Dropbox-like service for Google Drive), and several other paid apps/services. I'd love it if there were more!

I'm a Linux user, and I pay for software without hesitation. In some cases I even go out of my way to try to pay for something, which isn't always accepted by the developer(s).

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