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It's not that. It's that if I create and want to sell desktop software I would not loose substantial user base by NOT supporting Linux. I would concentrate my i

It's not that. It's that if I create and want to sell desktop software I would not loose substantial user base by NOT supporting Linux. I would concentrate my investments on Windows and/or maybe macOS and Linux is third and only nice to have. Nearly nobody makes big money with Linux desktop programs. Companies like e.g. Adobe know that.

danShumway 8y ago
On the other side of things, if I wanted to support only Windows, I would need to use Windows as a development machine, which would be a substantial loss to productivity for me. I don't feel like Windows in its current state is a platform that I would recommend to anyone who uses computers as a professional. So when I get to which platforms I support, if it's something personal for me, I only support Linux. If it's something that I plan to sell, I support Windows because that's where the money is, and Linux because, well, I've got this build sitting here, so I might as well throw it out as an experimental build (see Spotify, Unity, Reaper, etc...). Even if I'm developing a game that will rely on Windows specific APIs, I prefer to put those parts in last and do the majority of development on Linux. The exception to that is if I know I'm going to be doing a lot of support. I feel like handling support for Linux users is worse than handling support for Windows users, and will often cost me more time and money in the long run. So when I think about much bigger environments like Adobe, I'm sure they have Linux builds internally, because I just don't believe that their entire development staff would be content to use Windows. I would be willing to bet pretty heavily that there's a subset of Adobe engineers who have internal builds of Photoshop compiling on Linux. But compiling Photoshop for Linux is not the only challenge to actually releasing it on Linux. Linux fragmentation means you never know when something is going to go terribly wrong because somebody swapped out a random part of the host OS. It means another testing environment, and another set of internal documents about production deployments. I feel Linux is currently hands down the best engineering environment out there. But engineers don't handle support calls. So I would hazard that a lot more software is out there that could already run on Linux, but just hasn't been released.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Usually engineers at companies like Adobe use whatever the IT department allows their computer images to be. Normally rogue installs aren't well seen from security point of view.

danShumway 8y ago

On the other side of things, if I wanted to support only Windows, I would need to use Windows as a development machine, which would be a substantial loss to productivity for me. I don't feel like Windows in its current state is a platform that I would recommend to anyone who uses computers as a professional. So when I get to which platforms I support, if it's something personal for me, I only support Linux. If it's something that I plan to sell, I support Windows because that's where the money is, and Linux because, well, I've got this build sitting here, so I might as well throw it out as an experimental build (see Spotify, Unity, Reaper, etc...). Even if I'm developing a game that will rely on Windows specific APIs, I prefer to put those parts in last and do the majority of development on Linux. The exception to that is if I know I'm going to be doing a lot of support. I feel like handling support for Linux users is worse than handling support for Windows users, and will often cost me more time and money in the long run. So when I think about much bigger environments like Adobe, I'm sure they have Linux builds internally, because I just don't believe that their entire development staff would be content to use Windows. I would be willing to bet pretty heavily that there's a subset of Adobe engineers who have internal builds of Photoshop compiling on Linux. But compiling Photoshop for Linux is not the only challenge to actually releasing it on Linux. Linux fragmentation means you never know when something is going to go terribly wrong because somebody swapped out a random part of the host OS. It means another testing environment, and another set of internal documents about production deployments. I feel Linux is currently hands down the best engineering environment out there. But engineers don't handle support calls. So I would hazard that a lot more software is out there that could already run on Linux, but just hasn't been released.

pjmlp 8y ago
Usually engineers at companies like Adobe use whatever the IT department allows their computer images to be. Normally rogue installs aren't well seen from security point of view.