Comment by Aurornis
4 hours ago
> The main reason must companies don't publish Linux electron apps is fragmentation. If you're doing anything more than rendering a webpage as an app, it starts to get complicated.
Can confirm. At a past company we worked hard to release a Linux desktop client for our customers who wanted it, even though the number was small.
It turns into compatibility hell very fast. You think you can target a couple recent Ubuntu releases and everything will be good, but then you’re getting peppered with complaints from people using distributions you’ve never heard of because some part of the app isn’t working right. So your engineers spend a half day installing that in a VM and debugging it, but the problem is in upstream somewhere. The number of tickets with Linux issues keeps growing and each one is taking more time to debug, all for a number of customers that is so small you can’t justify doing it.
But those customers are angry. And vocal. They’re posting all over Twitter, Hacker News, and Reddit about how your company’s software is garbage, without mentioning that they’re running an unknown distribution on a 13 year old ThinkPad.
This even impacts open source projects. Several popular OSS Electron apps don’t work on many popular distros unless you set some command line workarounds, and even then it’s flakey. The open source projects get a pass because it’s open source, but if your company releases something you might be picking up a lot of angry, vocal customers that you didn’t want.
Yeah. I just dropped another repackaging repo for Wispr Flow. https://github.com/wispr-flow-linux/wispr-flow-linux
A lot of that is keyboard shortcuts for push-to-talk. Easy right?
X11 is mostly fine, but the world is moving into Wayland. Wayland doesn't have shortcuts native and relies on xdg-desktop-portal, which in turn relies on each backend to implement it's own version.
COSMIC from the Pop!OS team's xdg-desktop-cosmic doesn't support GlobalShortcuts yet (might now, haven't checked in a bit). So XWayland for them.
Tray icons? GNOME doesn't have a tray out of the box, but there's an extension. There's no standard for whether it's light mode or dark mode across distros and when you map out the options, no api's indicate whether the tray is light or dark while in light/dark mode. At some point you have to just accept it's not always perfect or patch in an override.
A lot of us are happy gnome doesn’t support tray icons. We are sick of devs thinking their app is so important it needs a visual presence at all times. If I need your app I’ll bring it to the foreground, we have the technology.
Global shortcuts definitely a pain point with Wayland but the portals are making progress.
Yeah, I don't want want to take away from anyone. The COSMIC team is doing amazing and hard work. I started dev on claude-desktop-debian with Pop!OS COSMIC as my daily. We're just in a weird spot for that particular issue right now. In 3 years, it'll be something else. That's the nature of fragmentation.
While GNOME tray lovers and haters both exist, only one of those two groups is liable to submit an issue against my repo looking for help getting icons working correctly.
> A lot of us are happy gnome doesn’t support tray icons.
A lot of us = very few people in total, apparently.
There's a reason Dash to Dock and AppIndicator are packaged by default on most Gnome distros and overwhelmingly installed on those that don't have it. Even Gnome itself has started development on a native systray, although in classic Gnome NIH fashion they either want to implement a new standard or are were even considering using the deprecated snixembed standard instead of using what 99% of Linux does :+)
(Technically they want it for pretty good reasons, but good luck forcing all Linux applications to implement yet another standard, especially the commercial applications)
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I don't like tray icons. What I like less is an app that runs in the background anyway when I didn't ask it to and that behavior is hidden. It's infuriating to "quit" an app and it's still there. At least gnome finally addressed that with the little background apps widget.
How do I bring your app to the foreground if I can't see an icon anywhere? I just installed Ubuntu for the first time a few weeks ago and genuinely don't see how people are supposed to use it, coming from a Windows/Mac background. How does a Linux user know what's running, without going to a terminal and running top?
The lack of desktop UI affordances in the leading "user-friendly" Linux distribution should be seen as a five-alarm fire by anyone interested in promoting wider Linux acceptance on the desktop. There are reasons why Linux can't get past low single-digit adoption no matter how badly Apple and Microsoft screw their users, and I'm sure the half-assed desktop UI is one of them.
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I don't have experience with Electron, but... IMO if you compile on something like Ubuntu 20, many applications will work reliably on Ubuntu 20, 22, 24,+, and Debian 2020 editions +. (Assuming same CPU arch as the compiling computer).
Obviously this will probably fail on other distros, but I've found in the past similar groupings. Backwards compatibility is different: I expect a package a compile on Ubuntu 24 not to work on Ubuntu 22.
This is anecdotal, and in the context of rust + EGUI, so I'm not sure how applicable it is to Electron.
I recently hit a Wayland snag: It doesn't support Device Events other than mouse movement. I worked around it by changing to Window events. I could see that being annoying if this substitution weren't acceptable, but it was in this case.
Reminds me that I occasionally have to set _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 because it's not always inherited from my login shell. Otherwise Java windows won't display anything because I suppose Java waits for them to be reparented.
On systemd, you can use ~/.config/environment.d to set it. Don't rely on your shell.
> they’re running an unknown distribution on a 13 year old ThinkPad.
"Tony Stark can do it in a cave! With rocks!"
This does feel like the perfect setup for Claude though.
Much easier to create a vm testing swarm of 100 disitributions with llms
Did you hire a Linux release engineer? Or was the situation the typical team of devs maining macOS that have never heard the term “Wayland” before plus That One Guy who switched to Ubuntu last year and advocated for it?
There are companies that do this right. But it often requires a hire. Too many companies think they can just yolo it because Linux isn’t a serious OS or whatever and then are surprised when it doesn’t work out well.
> Did you hire a Linux release engineer
That's often a great idea!
But a full time hire? The GP's post implies that wouldn't make business sense for them, as even half a day occasionally on it is too much...
>> So your engineers spend a half day installing that in a VM and debugging it, but the problem is in upstream somewhere. The number of tickets with Linux issues keeps growing and each one is taking more time to debug, all for a number of customers that is so small you can’t justify doing it.
Of course an experienced Linux release engineer can do it faster and more reliably. That's probably the cheaper option. But the business still has to decide their Linux customer or user base is large enough, or strategically worth supporting, to justify the cost however they do it.
For many businesses even fractional Linux support is not justifiable for the small number of Linux users and support requests they're unable to handle. Though I can't imagine that being the case for Anthropic!
(Hint: This is one of the things I consult on, if anyone is looking to pay for quality Linux release engineering and platform testing. I have hundreds of historical and current Linux VMs, multiple architectures old and new (esp. x86, ARM and RISC-V), some of them embedded, fairly deep knowledge of how the kernel and libraries work together, and test harnesses. Also I test some compiled applications for portability across other OSes and architectures, including Windows, MS-DOS, MacOS, BSDs, SunOS, HP-UX, etc. going all the way back to the early Unix lineage.)
Even for those who do this right, some things change under your feet because OSS maintainers of kernel feature A want to stop supporting V1 of A when V2 has been out for a decade. But the features missing in V2 are supposed to be provided by userspace B - and they are yet to tackle the functionality altogether. So now your app will just have to regress in features. It is very easy to ship OSS code as a maintainer of a project, it is very difficult to keep up with Linux as a developer unless you stick to libc. There is no one source of truth with regards to how things should work, there is no one roadmap, and maintainers care a lot more about complexity than maintaining feature parity of backwards compatibility. I do not blame them, but then it is difficult to target linux. Much easier to support a platform with guarantees and a shared vision. Saying this as someone who has only used Linux at home for 20 years.
Thanks to the Linux kernel's extremely high backward compatibility, and virtually all the libraries being open source, you can ship old or frozen versions of libraries with your application if you have to. You can defensively set shipped binaries as fallbacks in the event the application is running on a newer system that dropped critical functionality, while using the distro version if that's more up to date and still has the functionality. You can do the same for auxiliary programs your application uses.
I agree that sticking to libc is most reliable, if you can. But the experience is poor if you do that for desktop applications.
There's no singular source of truth, but there's a de facto frontier of only a few mainstream distros, as well as upstream heads for your dependencies.
It's extra work, but there are systematic workarounds to the feature drift over time and the tendancy of some open source projects to aggressively deprecate older functionality and older system compatilbilty.
You can, to an extent, automate testing on newer versions of distros to be alerted when something no longer works, and often you can do this before the official distro release date.
Unfortunately even libc is not reliable. Unless it's a static build, Glibc is often broken (with symbol version errors) when trying to run a binary compiled on one distro on another distro, or an older version of the same distro. Static binaries have other problems, though work very well if the application is self contained and isn't a GUI.
One thing that I find works very compatibly, though, is OpenGL / Vulkan binary-compatibility across distros and versions. There was a lot of work done on making libGL something you can link to or dynamically load reliably and take it from there. The OpenGL extension spaghetti is an interesting problem from then on, but that's more to do with the individual user's GPU and GPU drivers, independent of the Linux distro or even which OS it's running on.
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You compile for the lowest possible Linux kernel and bundle your libs. Don't use container formats for stuff like this. tar.gz with an installer script is king.
I dunno why this is always so difficult.
It's mostly dealing with different backends\compositors\etc.
My reply to the comment below outlines the shape of the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436#48435801
Just ship a flatpak?
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Flatpak mostly solves this for GUI apps.
It does not. You just get more vocal angry customers who hate Flatpak and hate you for using it.
There is a difference between mandating that your customers use one specific Linux distro which is maintained by a controversial company, and supporting all Linux distros through an imperfect-but-fully-working method.
Sure, you'll still get a few complaints from ideological purists, but there's no avoiding that regardless of what you do.
This feels analogous to the old Google latency improvement story - improve performance and p99 goes up, not down, because more people are now able to use your product.
These angry customers are a symptom of having more customers; in this direction (compatibility) companies shouldn't be KPI'ing on angry customers.
It is very legitimate that high compatibility means more very obscure, low value, high cost, bug reports that are hard to classify as such. And my gosh, I hate working with rude ticket writers.
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Can confirm, I hate flatpak
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434436#48435801
Made comment about flatpack below the comment above.