8 ms·

Relevant discussion: “Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets”[1] I feel like in open source this tends to work itself out with comm

Relevant discussion: “Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets”[1] I feel like in open source this tends to work itself out with community patches, but with closed source it can become a real pain. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18845205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18845205

rsyring 7y ago
I think what they may not consider is teams that have a small number of Linux users. In that case, Linux support could be required for the team to use Dropbox, even if the actual number of Linux devices is small. My point being that the 0.1% of sales might be true per device, but "supporting Linux" might actually bring more revenue than just the devices themselves would indicate because the whole team's revenue would be lost if they didn't support Linux.
- gwbas1c 7y ago
  Doubtful. I work for a major Dropbox competitor and we don't have any Linux support. We aren't loosing any sales over Linux, nor are we under any pressure for Linux support. Typically Linux support in products like this is organic: It happens when the engineers themselves use Linux and push upwards to support it. Anyway, with the amount of testing and verification we do on our product, desktop Linux is impractical. We try to verify on as many possible user configurations as possible. (Multiple Windows versions, 32-bit and 64-bit, Multiple Mac versions, remote desktop, ect). Linux is so heterogeneous that we could only really support it if it was a large customer where we targeted their typical configurations.
  - hackmiester 7y ago
    > We aren't loosing any sales over Linux How would you know if you were?
    - toomuchtodo 7y ago
      It's shorthand for, "We might be losing sales, but we assume they're a negligible amount of total potential revenue", which is a fair assumption to make.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - acdha 7y ago
      “We decided to go with <other vendor> because they have Linux support” “The sales team says that's a requirement for the companies they're talking to” “Competitor X has Linux support and they're growing faster with no other obvious explanation”
      - jeltz 7y ago
        Most customers never contact your sales team in the first place if they see that you do not support their stuff.
        acdha 7y ago
        This very much depends on the product but note that is exactly why I listed other possibilities. If Linux support was a big opportunity they’d know — maybe not precisely but enough to know it was hurting them. I’ve been using Linux for around 25 years, some of that selling commercial software and most buying. There’s a very noisy contingent of the community who make a lot of noise but never actually buy anything. You’ll go broke chasing their feature requests because there’s always one more thing before they can switch.
    - radiowave 7y ago
      In enterprise sales, there's often a huge disconnect between who you're selling to, and who is actually using the product. In which context it might actually be perfectly correct to say that you aren't losing any sales over it, even if there are thousands of users who would use Linux support, were it there.
  - snackematician 7y ago
    Not sure who you work for, but I'm going to talk about Box since that is the competitor I'm familiar with. I'm in academia and to my annoyance have to interact with Box which has no linux support (and has also deprecated existing workarounds like WebDAV). It's frustrating to me because academia is a major target for Box, and there are many of us linux users here. I wish the university admins that negotiate these deals would consider us. It also feels like Box has a dismissive attitude towards us. Linux support has been a much requested feature for a long time, for example see this years-long thread: https://community.box.com/t5/Desktop-and-Mobile-Forum/Status-of-Linux-client/td-p/22459 https://community.box.com/t5/Desktop-and-Mobile-Forum/Status.... IIRC mods encouraged people to vote for this feature request in BoxPulse, where it subsequently became one of the highest-voted features, but then labeled WONTFIX. Also annoying that Box supports linux-based Android, and also supported the less-used Windows phone. Yes there are a lot of linux distros out there, but Box could put out a snap, or just target one distro and let the other distros patch for themselves (like Steam does).
    - gwbas1c 7y ago
      The problem with supporting Linux, for commercial desktop software, is that it's extremely heterogeneous. Some user might be on Ubuntu, another on Redhat, another on Mandrake; all with very different details. Thus, what happens is that so-and-so runs such-and-such which happens to be incompatible because of some whacky configuration alignment that no one considered. The test matrix then becomes much more complicated than a traditional test matrix targeting common Windows and Mac configurations. That's fine for expensive software where the end user might have a very close relationship with the vendor, but for "cheap" software the cost of supporting every possible way someone configured their computer is significantly higher than targeting Windows and Mac. (Otherwise, the Linux version of a program might cost 2-10x what a Windows or Mac version will cost.) I like to think of desktop Linux as a DIY hobby; but not something that you can expect commercial software vendors to support.
      - danieldk 7y ago
        The problem with supporting Linux, for commercial desktop software, is that it's extremely heterogeneous. Some user might be on Ubuntu, another on Redhat, another on Mandrake; all with very different details. If you are targeting businesses, virtually nobody will run Mandrake (which does not exist anymore), Mandriva, Arch, or whatever. When you target Ubuntu LTS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you have probably covered most of the enterprise user base. (Otherwise, the Linux version of a program might cost 2-10x what a Windows or Mac version will cost.) This surprises me, because Apple changes and breaks a lot of stuff every macOS release and Apple only supports one or two versions back for security updates. In the meanwhile, RHEL only releases every half-decade or so and supports every release for much longer. Ubuntu LTSes are only released every two years and are then more or less frozen as well. I like to think of desktop Linux as a DIY hobby; but not something that you can expect commercial software vendors to support. Except if you care about servers. Or developers for that matter.
  - Shorel 7y ago
    I'm sure you don't lose a significant number of sales over Linux. The number of sales could probably be smaller than statistical error, and I think your company made the right decision. But using 'any' as an universal quantification is false, because some users like me are paying for products like pCloud precisely because they support Linux.
  - bad_user 7y ago
    As a Linux and MacOS user I would never recommend a solution that does not work on Linux, unless it's effectively a free complement to something else the company is paying for. As a Dropbox competitor I know that you've lost at least a couple of sales because with all the companies I worked thus far the only sync solutions used at the company level are Dropbox and Google Drive. And the later is only used because it's attached to Google Suite, but nobody pays for extra storage. And all the companies I worked with have some Linux users. And I know, correlation is not causation, but I know that at least one of those companies haven't gone with Box because of missing Linux support. If you haven't noticed lost sales it might be because companies with Linux users aren't even bothering to check you out.
    - gwbas1c 7y ago
      We support Mac. That's rather challenging because Mac users are a minority, yet Mac development tends to be more expensive.
  - danieldk 7y ago
    Anyway, with the amount of testing and verification we do on our product, desktop Linux is impractical. And yet, there are many open source projects have the scale of a file synchronization tool or larger, that manage to work fine (and run a large battery of tests) across different Linux distributions, BSDs, and macOS. I don't think it is impractical, it is probably just not a good business case. (I don't necessarily agree, I think Linux users will typically send more fine-grained and useful bug reports and might help you shake out bugs more quickly.)
- munchbunny 7y ago
  On the one hand, that might be true, but I doubt that it's true enough in practice. Presuming competent PM's and data analysts, they've likely accounted for individuals vs. teams to begin with. Even if they haven't and it's literally 0.1% Linux users, I think that it's unlikely a team will pivot on a sale because of a few users who insist on not using ext4. Instead, those Linux users will probably just end up creating ext4 partitions somewhere so everyone can get on with their jobs.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Storage is a commodity like toilet paper. If your preferred brand of toilet paper required you to remodel your bathroom would you do so or buy different toilet paper?
    - munchbunny 7y ago
      I'm not sure how your analogy works. 1. Dropbox isn't just storage. If it was just storage, it would never have taken off. The reason Dropbox makes tons of money is because it's actually selling a process. Still commoditized, but it's not as lightweight as toilet paper. 2. If you feel like creating an ext4 partition is analogous to remodeling your bathroom, I would question where you choose to hold strong opinions. I think you have your analogy backwards. I'd happily switch out the toilet paper brand (the file system on one partition) in my bathroom (how my team and I manage shared documents) if that's what it takes to make the bathroom fit its purpose. Besides, Dropbox didn't kill Linux support, they scaled it down to ext4, which is a perfectly inoffensive choice of file system for an end user.
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
        Zfs has a lot of features over ext4 its not remotely equivalent. Replacing this functionality on ext4 requires an entire stack of alternatives. Worse if you opt to use zfs and ext 4 you now need 2 complete stacks or to use an inferior set of tools to be compatible with a commodity service.
- brightball 7y ago
  Yes, this. I often have this same conversation with restaurants who don’t have gluten free options. You certainly aren’t obligated to do so, but if you don’t have any and there is a single person in our dinner group who needs them...our entire group goes elsewhere.
  - VeninVidiaVicii 7y ago
    While this is true, I think a more subtle reason to support Linux is the open-source scripts devs setup that may be mission critical. I work in a bioinformatics lab, and I access Dropbox through the command prompt and do a lot of file cleanup through scripts for dozens of researchers, which is impossible on Windows or Apple. This BTRFS reversal last year was a nightmare for everyone's research even though I'm the only one who uses Linux.
    - AceJohnny2 7y ago
      > which is impossible on [..] Apple. Out of curiosity, why is that? macOS does provide a Unix environment and Bash & Zsh shells. (and Homebrew or MacPorts are package managers that can provide updated versions of whatever)
      - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
        Windows, what about PowerShell? I've not used it extensively, but have heard good things. Or just use Python across all three platforms?
        VeninVidiaVicii 7y ago
        Honestly it's not really feasible to use Python when basic Linux tools like comm, or dos2linux, which take literally just a few characters, recreating the functionality in Python would be a headache.
        TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
- moocowtruck 7y ago
  Yep, I am not a user of any of these services yet... but if I did go with one it would definitely require linux support and knowing I can trust the company wouldn't screw me. Just because the current sales are low does not mean there's no ability to make good future sales.
jhoechtl 7y ago
Linux users are tech-savy, know how to file bug reports ans help oberproportionally to improve a product. May be another explanation.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  yet another explanation may be the fractured nature of the eco system. Every time I look at linux software bug trackers a good portion is distro related.
  - CountSessine 7y ago
    This is why the right way to support linux is to solidly support exactly one and only one distro, and then let the rest conform or work around it.
- davesmith1983 7y ago
  I would beg to differ. There are a lot of people / kids using it that don't really understand what is going on under the hood. Also the number of bugs that get marked as Won't Fix that are real problems by upstream doesn't help so a lot of people like myself just don't bother after a while and just end up using something else or living with it being broken.
mugsie 7y ago
I wish it worked it self out with community patches - more likely is a github mega issue, with people suggesting their forks as solutions if the original maintainer doesn't reply for 24 hours, or during the UTC+8 9am-5pm window.
Shorel 7y ago
Multiplatform code when tested tends to show more bugs than single platform code. Also, using different compilers (when it is possible) will help find obscure but real bugs. In the end this makes the code more robust for all users, not only Linux users.
- davesmith1983 7y ago
  > Multiplatform code when tested tends to show more bugs than single platform code. Why would it make the code more robust for users on other platforms if they aren't experiencing those bugs? Is exposing these bugs worth the extra development time? Surely just compiling with a different compiler is as likely to find bug in the compiler. I am not saying you are wrong but you are making a lot of assumptions.
  - berkut 7y ago
    This has been my experience as well writing cross-platform software (some of it proprietary in the past). Because different compilers and different stdlibs do things in subtlety different ways, that may just work on one platform by chance. Memory alignment/layout is often slightly different for example. Then IO behaviour is often quite different on Linux and OS X despite both being POSIX... (and once you need high performance or Async IO, you're using native APIs anyway). Memory behaviour is also quite different in terms of buffering, when memory gets freed, etc - e.g. on Linux you often need some malloc_trim(0) calls to actually release recently-free'd memory), on other platforms that's not as necessary, so there are subtleties there. Different platforms often have different includes as well (on Linux, you generally use GCC's STL/stdlib, on Windows it's a totally different set).
    - davesmith1983 7y ago
      I understand this. Think more along the lines of "If a tree falls down in a forest, does it make any sound if there is nobody there to hear it?". If there is a defect on Linux, but nobody is running it on Linux, is there really a defect?
michaelmrose 7y ago
If your software crashed it was probably broken to start with you just didn't know it yet. Tickets showing actual bugs not tech support requests from people that can't read directions are valuable resources.
tripzilch 7y ago
> Relevant discussion: “Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets”[1] Might be fair to note that these numbers are for a video game, not a file syncing app. Linux is relatively new territory there, let's say when Steam started supporting it.

rsyring 7y ago

I think what they may not consider is teams that have a small number of Linux users. In that case, Linux support could be required for the team to use Dropbox, even if the actual number of Linux devices is small. My point being that the 0.1% of sales might be true per device, but "supporting Linux" might actually bring more revenue than just the devices themselves would indicate because the whole team's revenue would be lost if they didn't support Linux.

gwbas1c 7y ago
Doubtful. I work for a major Dropbox competitor and we don't have any Linux support. We aren't loosing any sales over Linux, nor are we under any pressure for Linux support. Typically Linux support in products like this is organic: It happens when the engineers themselves use Linux and push upwards to support it. Anyway, with the amount of testing and verification we do on our product, desktop Linux is impractical. We try to verify on as many possible user configurations as possible. (Multiple Windows versions, 32-bit and 64-bit, Multiple Mac versions, remote desktop, ect). Linux is so heterogeneous that we could only really support it if it was a large customer where we targeted their typical configurations.
- hackmiester 7y ago
  > We aren't loosing any sales over Linux How would you know if you were?
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    It's shorthand for, "We might be losing sales, but we assume they're a negligible amount of total potential revenue", which is a fair assumption to make.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - acdha 7y ago
    “We decided to go with <other vendor> because they have Linux support” “The sales team says that's a requirement for the companies they're talking to” “Competitor X has Linux support and they're growing faster with no other obvious explanation”
    - jeltz 7y ago
      Most customers never contact your sales team in the first place if they see that you do not support their stuff.
      - acdha 7y ago
        This very much depends on the product but note that is exactly why I listed other possibilities. If Linux support was a big opportunity they’d know — maybe not precisely but enough to know it was hurting them. I’ve been using Linux for around 25 years, some of that selling commercial software and most buying. There’s a very noisy contingent of the community who make a lot of noise but never actually buy anything. You’ll go broke chasing their feature requests because there’s always one more thing before they can switch.
  - radiowave 7y ago
    In enterprise sales, there's often a huge disconnect between who you're selling to, and who is actually using the product. In which context it might actually be perfectly correct to say that you aren't losing any sales over it, even if there are thousands of users who would use Linux support, were it there.
- snackematician 7y ago
  Not sure who you work for, but I'm going to talk about Box since that is the competitor I'm familiar with. I'm in academia and to my annoyance have to interact with Box which has no linux support (and has also deprecated existing workarounds like WebDAV). It's frustrating to me because academia is a major target for Box, and there are many of us linux users here. I wish the university admins that negotiate these deals would consider us. It also feels like Box has a dismissive attitude towards us. Linux support has been a much requested feature for a long time, for example see this years-long thread: https://community.box.com/t5/Desktop-and-Mobile-Forum/Status-of-Linux-client/td-p/22459 https://community.box.com/t5/Desktop-and-Mobile-Forum/Status.... IIRC mods encouraged people to vote for this feature request in BoxPulse, where it subsequently became one of the highest-voted features, but then labeled WONTFIX. Also annoying that Box supports linux-based Android, and also supported the less-used Windows phone. Yes there are a lot of linux distros out there, but Box could put out a snap, or just target one distro and let the other distros patch for themselves (like Steam does).
  - gwbas1c 7y ago
    The problem with supporting Linux, for commercial desktop software, is that it's extremely heterogeneous. Some user might be on Ubuntu, another on Redhat, another on Mandrake; all with very different details. Thus, what happens is that so-and-so runs such-and-such which happens to be incompatible because of some whacky configuration alignment that no one considered. The test matrix then becomes much more complicated than a traditional test matrix targeting common Windows and Mac configurations. That's fine for expensive software where the end user might have a very close relationship with the vendor, but for "cheap" software the cost of supporting every possible way someone configured their computer is significantly higher than targeting Windows and Mac. (Otherwise, the Linux version of a program might cost 2-10x what a Windows or Mac version will cost.) I like to think of desktop Linux as a DIY hobby; but not something that you can expect commercial software vendors to support.
    - danieldk 7y ago
      The problem with supporting Linux, for commercial desktop software, is that it's extremely heterogeneous. Some user might be on Ubuntu, another on Redhat, another on Mandrake; all with very different details. If you are targeting businesses, virtually nobody will run Mandrake (which does not exist anymore), Mandriva, Arch, or whatever. When you target Ubuntu LTS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you have probably covered most of the enterprise user base. (Otherwise, the Linux version of a program might cost 2-10x what a Windows or Mac version will cost.) This surprises me, because Apple changes and breaks a lot of stuff every macOS release and Apple only supports one or two versions back for security updates. In the meanwhile, RHEL only releases every half-decade or so and supports every release for much longer. Ubuntu LTSes are only released every two years and are then more or less frozen as well. I like to think of desktop Linux as a DIY hobby; but not something that you can expect commercial software vendors to support. Except if you care about servers. Or developers for that matter.
- Shorel 7y ago
  I'm sure you don't lose a significant number of sales over Linux. The number of sales could probably be smaller than statistical error, and I think your company made the right decision. But using 'any' as an universal quantification is false, because some users like me are paying for products like pCloud precisely because they support Linux.
- bad_user 7y ago
  As a Linux and MacOS user I would never recommend a solution that does not work on Linux, unless it's effectively a free complement to something else the company is paying for. As a Dropbox competitor I know that you've lost at least a couple of sales because with all the companies I worked thus far the only sync solutions used at the company level are Dropbox and Google Drive. And the later is only used because it's attached to Google Suite, but nobody pays for extra storage. And all the companies I worked with have some Linux users. And I know, correlation is not causation, but I know that at least one of those companies haven't gone with Box because of missing Linux support. If you haven't noticed lost sales it might be because companies with Linux users aren't even bothering to check you out.
  - gwbas1c 7y ago
    We support Mac. That's rather challenging because Mac users are a minority, yet Mac development tends to be more expensive.
- danieldk 7y ago
  Anyway, with the amount of testing and verification we do on our product, desktop Linux is impractical. And yet, there are many open source projects have the scale of a file synchronization tool or larger, that manage to work fine (and run a large battery of tests) across different Linux distributions, BSDs, and macOS. I don't think it is impractical, it is probably just not a good business case. (I don't necessarily agree, I think Linux users will typically send more fine-grained and useful bug reports and might help you shake out bugs more quickly.)
munchbunny 7y ago
On the one hand, that might be true, but I doubt that it's true enough in practice. Presuming competent PM's and data analysts, they've likely accounted for individuals vs. teams to begin with. Even if they haven't and it's literally 0.1% Linux users, I think that it's unlikely a team will pivot on a sale because of a few users who insist on not using ext4. Instead, those Linux users will probably just end up creating ext4 partitions somewhere so everyone can get on with their jobs.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Storage is a commodity like toilet paper. If your preferred brand of toilet paper required you to remodel your bathroom would you do so or buy different toilet paper?
  - munchbunny 7y ago
    I'm not sure how your analogy works. 1. Dropbox isn't just storage. If it was just storage, it would never have taken off. The reason Dropbox makes tons of money is because it's actually selling a process. Still commoditized, but it's not as lightweight as toilet paper. 2. If you feel like creating an ext4 partition is analogous to remodeling your bathroom, I would question where you choose to hold strong opinions. I think you have your analogy backwards. I'd happily switch out the toilet paper brand (the file system on one partition) in my bathroom (how my team and I manage shared documents) if that's what it takes to make the bathroom fit its purpose. Besides, Dropbox didn't kill Linux support, they scaled it down to ext4, which is a perfectly inoffensive choice of file system for an end user.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      Zfs has a lot of features over ext4 its not remotely equivalent. Replacing this functionality on ext4 requires an entire stack of alternatives. Worse if you opt to use zfs and ext 4 you now need 2 complete stacks or to use an inferior set of tools to be compatible with a commodity service.
brightball 7y ago
Yes, this. I often have this same conversation with restaurants who don’t have gluten free options. You certainly aren’t obligated to do so, but if you don’t have any and there is a single person in our dinner group who needs them...our entire group goes elsewhere.
- VeninVidiaVicii 7y ago
  While this is true, I think a more subtle reason to support Linux is the open-source scripts devs setup that may be mission critical. I work in a bioinformatics lab, and I access Dropbox through the command prompt and do a lot of file cleanup through scripts for dozens of researchers, which is impossible on Windows or Apple. This BTRFS reversal last year was a nightmare for everyone's research even though I'm the only one who uses Linux.
  - AceJohnny2 7y ago
    > which is impossible on [..] Apple. Out of curiosity, why is that? macOS does provide a Unix environment and Bash & Zsh shells. (and Homebrew or MacPorts are package managers that can provide updated versions of whatever)
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      Windows, what about PowerShell? I've not used it extensively, but have heard good things. Or just use Python across all three platforms?
      - VeninVidiaVicii 7y ago
        Honestly it's not really feasible to use Python when basic Linux tools like comm, or dos2linux, which take literally just a few characters, recreating the functionality in Python would be a headache.
        TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
moocowtruck 7y ago
Yep, I am not a user of any of these services yet... but if I did go with one it would definitely require linux support and knowing I can trust the company wouldn't screw me. Just because the current sales are low does not mean there's no ability to make good future sales.

jhoechtl 7y ago

Linux users are tech-savy, know how to file bug reports ans help oberproportionally to improve a product. May be another explanation.

Barrin92 7y ago
yet another explanation may be the fractured nature of the eco system. Every time I look at linux software bug trackers a good portion is distro related.
- CountSessine 7y ago
  This is why the right way to support linux is to solidly support exactly one and only one distro, and then let the rest conform or work around it.
davesmith1983 7y ago
I would beg to differ. There are a lot of people / kids using it that don't really understand what is going on under the hood. Also the number of bugs that get marked as Won't Fix that are real problems by upstream doesn't help so a lot of people like myself just don't bother after a while and just end up using something else or living with it being broken.

mugsie 7y ago

I wish it worked it self out with community patches - more likely is a github mega issue, with people suggesting their forks as solutions if the original maintainer doesn't reply for 24 hours, or during the UTC+8 9am-5pm window.

Shorel 7y ago

Multiplatform code when tested tends to show more bugs than single platform code. Also, using different compilers (when it is possible) will help find obscure but real bugs. In the end this makes the code more robust for all users, not only Linux users.

davesmith1983 7y ago
> Multiplatform code when tested tends to show more bugs than single platform code. Why would it make the code more robust for users on other platforms if they aren't experiencing those bugs? Is exposing these bugs worth the extra development time? Surely just compiling with a different compiler is as likely to find bug in the compiler. I am not saying you are wrong but you are making a lot of assumptions.
- berkut 7y ago
  This has been my experience as well writing cross-platform software (some of it proprietary in the past). Because different compilers and different stdlibs do things in subtlety different ways, that may just work on one platform by chance. Memory alignment/layout is often slightly different for example. Then IO behaviour is often quite different on Linux and OS X despite both being POSIX... (and once you need high performance or Async IO, you're using native APIs anyway). Memory behaviour is also quite different in terms of buffering, when memory gets freed, etc - e.g. on Linux you often need some malloc_trim(0) calls to actually release recently-free'd memory), on other platforms that's not as necessary, so there are subtleties there. Different platforms often have different includes as well (on Linux, you generally use GCC's STL/stdlib, on Windows it's a totally different set).
  - davesmith1983 7y ago
    I understand this. Think more along the lines of "If a tree falls down in a forest, does it make any sound if there is nobody there to hear it?". If there is a defect on Linux, but nobody is running it on Linux, is there really a defect?

michaelmrose 7y ago

If your software crashed it was probably broken to start with you just didn't know it yet. Tickets showing actual bugs not tech support requests from people that can't read directions are valuable resources.

tripzilch 7y ago

> Relevant discussion: “Linux users were only 0.1% of sales but 20% of crashes and tickets”[1] Might be fair to note that these numbers are for a video game, not a file syncing app. Linux is relatively new territory there, let's say when Steam started supporting it.