Well crap… we were just about to switch over to Linux because of all of the security holes in windows and others issues we have had with Microsoft products. We really like Lightburn but maybe it’s time to find something else that doesn’t exploit the Microsoft mantra. We currently have 5 seats for our shop.
It didn’t occur to me that Millmage won’t be supported in Linux either. I guess it makes business sense but it is a bit depressing to realize. I really don’t like the direction that W11 is going and was hoping to shift almost all of what I do away from Windows by the time the W10 abandonment forces a change.
It’s not just windows… Pretty soon we’ll probably be paying extra as both Windows and Mac are moving to very restrictive and licensed application mode…
Eventually, they will also lock it down, there is no doubt that will happen, on both Windows and Mac… it’s financially beneficial to have a closed system… with known software applications running.
Much like our phones… There are phones in the EU that are open for users to remove or add software, like we used to enjoy… I looked into these, but he USA won’t allow them on our networks 
It’s not unusual for a software company to be bought out by a competitor and it just becomes vaporware… Many companies have bought out competition and just killed the product to protect their own business.
If you want more Linux, you have to support it, via your wallet.
How many of you have sent any money directed to supporting Linux? I send a $100 every couple of years to Debian or Ubuntu… I’m in the minority. This is also part of the problem. Maybe I should have sent it to Lightburn 
It always comes down to the bottom line (finance) and Linux has always gotten the short stick.
Unfortunately this just adds to what makes Linux a less desirable OS, if you can’t get the software for it. This just adds more bumps for us driving the Linux highway.
I’m just glad we get something out of it, if only a few years.
Blame it on the all mighty buck 
We’ve made no secret of the fact that we only support two or three distros of Linux, and on a single hardware platform (x64).
Despite this, because it’s Linux and people don’t understand things, they assume it should already run on a Chromebook, an rPI, and over 200 different Linux flavors, and email us for support when it doesn’t work.
Shipping an ISO image with LightBurn on it is not going to improve things - it would simply change the complaints. An ISO would mean every update was an OS reinstall, wiping everything on that drive, unless I’m seriously misunderstanding the idea.
We already have people complaining that we do this with the Bridge, and that’s an appliance with no UI.
Nearly all the solutions here are things we’ve come up with internally over the last year or so of discussion. Many we’ve actually tried, and had them fail for a variety of reasons.
We really didn’t want to do this - half the devs here run Linux and develop the software on it, and yet we’ve all arrived at the same conclusion.
I can only guess that these people would email support instead of using the forum because they don’t know otherwise and it’s likely in the corporate culture to help as much as possible even when LightBurn is not being used on a ‘supported’ distribution. There should have been a way to gracefully redirect them while stating only having personnel to help on the supported versions. No doubt it’s made things quite frustrating for everyone.
There would be 2 ways of doing this:
The 1nd way to use a LightBurn distro ISO is to just boot it directly from the ISO file in read-only mode. It runs the same every time. With a flag on the kernel boot parameter list( persistent ) the booting kernel will look for a file or partition label with the name casper-rw and if it finds it that becomes an overlay filesystem which allows modified files to be saved and used in that read-write file or partition overlaying the read-only filesystem of the bootable ISO.
Updates in this situation for the user would be to just update the bootable USB drive or replace the iso file on their hard disk if they are booting the iso file directly from the hard disk. It’s like a virtual appliance and LightBurn devs control the full runtime environment. Package management can be restricted or enhanced.
The 2nd way to go:
The ISO was installed which would mean that updates could be a .run script as before or an repository package(apt, deb, etc). But the devs would know the distribution LightBurns, the repository URLs would point to standard Debian or Ubuntu with a LightBurn URL. So the devs would know the libraries and versions were as originally intended. If for instance Debian 12.x were the base or Kubuntu 22.04 the was the base the devs only deal with those packages. Just like how Kubuntu is based on Ubuntu. The apt repo thing might or might not be desirable but many software packages use it.
example: WINE
deb https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/ noble main
example possible: LightBurn
deb https://dl.lightburnsoftware.com/linux-builds/kubuntu/ noble main
The just of this method is there is only 1 supported Linux platform for LightBurn and it’s the same single platform LightBurn devs work with. There could still be issues every 3-5 years when a new release comes out but Ubuntu tends to provide security updates for quite a while for LTS versions.
System updates from Ubuntu would have to be validated by LightBurn Devs periodically and there might be a way to restrict system updates such that they are tied to LightBurn version updates.
Neither is a push a file and walk away but with specific instructions to go to forum.lightburnsoftware.com/lightburn-for-linux-v1.7 for support other than licensing issues maybe the community can jump in to be the first level of support with not LightBurn app specific issues.
Maybe one of your devs and download Kubuntu 22.04 (it’s got qt desktop ) and put it on a USB thumbdrive and show how a PC, Mac or desktop can be directed to boot from the USB drive and run Linux in read-only mode and even install LightBurn and run it.
https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/22.04.4/release/kubuntu-22.04.4-desktop-amd64.iso
One of the biggest concerns we’d have with anything like this is licensing. Our license library, Cryptlex, was really not designed to run in a scenario like this. As it is we’ve already heard of users using live boot environments as a way to get an infinite trial.
The only thing I can think of in the 30 seconds I’ve put into it right now is to have a login with the license key or you log into the license manager. I would say that the LightBurn for Linux version would require a license and trails were only supported on Mac or Windows.
I agree that there would have to be a way to abide by the licensing system one way or another. Although I would not see a mass migration of Linux users just to get LightBurn running for free.
All of this is great, yet largely misses the point: packaging is but one of the many heads on the hydra that is Linux support, and it’s not the biggest pain point.
Correct, just offering ways to tame some of the pain points like library and application packaging, installation consistency and some of the customer support head-aches.
There’s still the coding side and limiting the targets to one distribution was an effort to reduce some issues there. If there’s a big shift to a different coding framework or something where there’s no Linux support and no ‘easy’ work-around the choice could be no support for that in the Linux version. Thinking of the camera capabilities.
Linux is generally pretty popular in the maker community and that includes robotics, AI, 3DP, lasers and CNC. Like others, just don’t like the thought of that without LightBurn.
In our case “pretty popular” means 3000 active users on that platform, compared to over 500,000 between the other two, so I’m going to say you and I have different definitions of that phrase. 
I’m thinking it’s more that our venn diagrams are different. Raspberry Pi is included in mine and that alone has over 5,000,000 users. Less than a dozen are running LightBurn on it through emulation though since hardly anyone knows of it working and it’s not a setup.exe installation.
There’s no argument that people don’t even know Linux exists and only know Mac and Windows. My point was more about there being a growing number of potential customers.
Would management agree to allowing a community supported branch of LightBurn, maybe derived from a slightly older version or reduced source code set or support only for ‘open’ hardware interfaces, e.g. grbl, etc.
I also use QcadCam professional which has a community supported version, as found in many Linux distros. It doesn’t have some more advanced features, (Lite version), but gives new users the ability to use the software and maybe in the future purchase the fully capable commercial package.
It could introduce future Linux users to LightBurn, helps them learn the interface and some capabilities before moving up to the commercial license. I have found it more capable than other cam packages available for Linux.
The last release of 1.7 will continue to work, as we like to joke until the heat death of the sun and will continue to work on Linux for the same time. We simply will not be releasing Linux builds after 1.7.
As a relatively new LightBurn user, only two years is considered a newbie to some, My Thoughts are to keep using the last issued version of Lightburn For Linux and take that PC off-line. In the past, I’ve worked with many different kinds of software, and most of the customers are running with their PCs off-line. If whatever version of Windows or Linux, you are running works well with the software it doesn’t need to be updated especially if you’re not getting new updates from LightBurn.
To be honest this it would be more work to pull apart our code base into the parts we were theoretically willing to open source than it would be to just keep supporting Linux.
And that’s assuming there are any parts of the codebase we’d be willing to open source, which there aren’t.
Jack, I couldn’t agree with you more. If you use, and like something - pay for it.
Having been a product manager, on both the hardware and software sides, for most of my career I’ve seen many trends arrive and fade. Sadly the trends for subscription services and locking down ecosystems seem here to stay.
I guess it’s not IF, it’s when you drop linux support, could you find it in your hearts to expand the art library functionality? Printing a catalogue, moving between libraries, exporting a library into parts, directory structure within the art libraries, hell even a format for the library so that someone else could write a standalone program would be beneficial. This way those of us who have expended a considerable amount of effort with the art libraries can move on easily. I’d have over 60 pages of etsy purchases to re-download and re-import into whatever new program comes along that can replace the linux functionality of LB.
Hello. This is my first post. I’m surprised that people using Linux can’t read with understanding, where reading documentation is essential. I am not surprised by the owners’ attitude that they are giving up support for Linux, although I must admit that I am sad about this. I have been using Linux since Krenel 2.2.19 and I have seen something. The problem is not the kernel, architecture or packaging. The problem is the multitude distribution and their versions. As a result, it turns out that you have several Pythons, several Glibs, etc. in your system, because this program needs one version and another another one and you need to make sure that it does not fall apart. For me as a Linux user, it doesn’t matter how it is packaged or whether it is packaged at all. Snap or flatpak is not a solution. It is something that breaks systems over time. I do not recommend. Another issue is Linux users who have double-click in their blood and will not go beyond Ubuntu, for example, because they cannot automate the system for themselves and they terrorize programmers for a package for their distro. How can you see the potential of Linux using a fork of Debian, which is as sluggish and slow as Windows? I don’t think there are any forks, only real distributions and the rest is a curiosity. There is a reason that the top_500 supercomputers are under the control of Linux. But it was never a system for the user. The last decade has changed a lot, I remember the emergence of graphical environments on Linux and great progress has been made, but unfortunately it still remains a niche system precisely because of what Linus Torvalds and I mentioned.
I am also kind of sad to hear this as I was planning to migrate to Linux myself after being forced to upgrade to Windows 11 due to EOL from Windows 10.
But I do understand fully the decision as to the sheer amount of different distros and combinations of software stands within. And the fact that alot of problems are from people who grew up with point and click and don’t really know what is going on in the background and don’t realize that it does need more work for things to go smoothly… They are just used to installing a program and assuming it just works out of the box.
But i will still download the latest version for Linux and have it stored for when I do change systems down the road. I would like to thank the whole team who was working on the Linux side for all their work and know how hard of a decision it had to have been for them.
Not really needed to store it
LightBurn holds repository going all the way back to 0.6.00
https://release.lightburnsoftware.com/LightBurn/Release
Also as backup GitHub