Hacker News Reader

Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the feedback - I'm curious if you have any suggestions for how I can assure you that it will work on GNU/Linux? The second sentence of the installation instructions links to "setup instructions for a Linux-based VPS".

View on HN

If you really want to broaden appeal you should do what Dropbox does on their download page – show screenshots specific to the user's OS. If your serve the images embedded into GitHub README from your own hosting, you can do that very easily. But you'll have to take all these screenshots, no way around that.

That’s great advice. Thank you!

Just taking your screenshots from Iceweasel/Chromium instead of Safari would be an easy step. It shows that you've tried your project on a GNU/Linux platform at least once. I don't use any Webkit-based browsers, so it doesn't help me at all if you've designed your site/project to work well with Webkit.

Will take that into consideration - to be fair, the existing screenshots are from Chrome (just running on OS X).

So perhaps you should keep doing what you are doing and not get derailed by someone whose goal is not to find a good software, but is to gripe about the marginalization of Linux even when it is completely irrelevant to context.

No, I would say showing screenshots from all "supported" platforms is a good idea. The cost is very low, and preventing people from feeling marginalized is a win for you and your software.

Anecdotally, I can say that I am going to have a look at the software, and this just because the author was willing to consider us Linux users.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com