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Comment by tempest_ | Hacker News Reader

Getting it running in linux is the easiest part dev wise.

It is the rest of the iceberg that causes problems.

- You need your support to be able to support linux which means they will need training and experience helping people in an entirely new system

- Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with the above

- Gotta track bugs in twice as many places

- Need CI / CD for more platforms

etc

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>- Linux comes in finite but vastly more combinations than OSX and Windows which means you are probably going to need to pick something like Ubuntu or struggle with the above

This is easily solvable by distributing the app via a distro agnostic mechanism, like as a Flatpak or AppImage. Using Flatpak also eliminates the need for rolling their own app update mechanism.

AppImage relies on the old, unmaintained and suid root fuse2. Not a wise choice in 2025.

But most of those issues are because Linux doesn't have enough market share. No one brushes off Windows because they need to support Windows and they need to add CI/CD for Windows.

The combination issue is a real issue though that (as far as I know) is mostly solved with Flatpaks, or in case of games, by using the Steam Runtime.

Of course, it is a "chicken and egg" problem of "we don't want to support Linux because there aren't enough users using it" but "we don't want to use Linux because there aren't enough business supporting it".

Thankfully with improvements in Wine the need of having "native" Linux support is shrinking, but at the same time there is still a looooong way to go (like the issues I said before with Affinity).

Windows userland compatibility is outstanding. I can run most 30 year old Windows applications on Windows 11 without a problem. This makes it easy for a commercial vendor to support their applications on Windows.

The same is not at all true on Linux.

Right now at work, I’ve got a bunch of commercial apps built for RHEL9 for which I’m chasing vendors for new builds that work on RHEL10, for a variety of reasons. Dependencies like libXScrnSaver have simply been removed, and so apps linked against that library no longer work.

Funnily enough there are old Windows applications that do work on Wine, but doesn't work on Windows 11

And then people wonder, why electron became a thing.

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