| ▲ | rock_artist 7 hours ago | |
I agree with the author. I've made nice cross-platform pro metronome (as some use timer which is bad) Apple, Microsoft, Google - none is easy meaning you need to have Play store, certs, codesign, submit... But there are steps with few results making it easy for those platform to get the software. I have tried my best getting also Linux but as the author said, there's nothing trivial (as my metronome GitHub issues can show https://github.com/talaviram/TICK/issues) The name is exactly the tricky part... Linux has so many flavors. Even without installer, you have X server and Wayland and snap, AppImage, .deb each differ. add to that audio plug-in formats (CLAP, LV2, VST3) and the fact that some formats has no specific path for putting files. For simple apps (not cli tools or ones aimed for package managers I start to think best is just providing an archive file (zip/tarball/etc) While Linux is growing and is my goto for non-macOS, with so many releases, it still feels most users are more technical than other platforms. Add the LLM age where you can ask it to install it for you. a zip with binaries might be simplest for simple software. | ||
| ▲ | embedding-shape 7 hours ago | parent [-] | |
The traditional way on Linux, at least in FOSS, has been to basically ship the binary somehow, also make the source available, then if people want it for Debian or whatever, they'll package it themselves. Typically, the person(s) developing the software itself are different people(s) who package it. So you'll have the application/library developer(s), then if people want it for their distribution, one of them has to decide to package it and make it available. Of course, people nowadays try to make it easier for the distributions and provide packaging for them. But I don't think this is requirement, you can just ship a binary and most Linux users will be able to run them, and it'll basically "package itself over time" if it's interesting enough for people to want that sort of integration. There is no right/wrong or correct/incorrect approaches here, just giving ideas :) | ||