Linux support to end after v1.7

We all do here too, honestly. As Adam mentioned, this is something we’ve been discussing for a long time - well over a year at this point - but a few things have changed that kind of forced our hand in a few ways.

  1. We build more installers for Linux than any other platform, and that appears to be getting worse, not better, because it feels like every new Linux user wants us to support their favored distro, and has opinions on how it should be packaged / delivered.

  2. We’re at the point where a number of the supported MacOS and Windows OS versions we currently support are being phased out by the framework we use, and moving to a later version is going to require us to take over supporting some of the stuff that system provided in the past, the biggest being camera access. This means writing custom libraries for every platform. The one for Linux will likely take as much time as the ones for Mac and Windows, but will have significantly less impact on the user base.

  3. We spend a disproportionate amount of time on Linux support, relative to the other two platforms. It’s 1% of our user base, but a much larger portion of the support load.

The devs are already pulled in lots of different directions and we have to pick what we tackle based on what impacts the largest numbers of our users, and sadly that isn’t Linux support. None of us like it, but we need to do this.

I absolutely agree, and that’s a big part of the reason it took as long as it did for us to get here. I know quite a few people who are very active here are Linux users, and we knew you’d be disappointed.

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