Linux @lemmy.ml Steamymoomilk @sh.itjust.works 4mo ago

Lightburn laser cutting software is killing linux support.

forum.lightburnsoftware.com Linux support to end after v1.7

We all do here too, honestly. As Adam mentioned, this is something we’ve been discussing for a long time - well over a year at this point - but a few things have changed that kind of forced our hand in a few ways. We build more installers for Linux than any other platform, and that appears to be ...

As a advid user of lightburn for my business, this truely saddens me.

I loved being able to have the freedom to run linux and have 1st class support.

Lightburn states in this post, about how linux is less than 1℅ of there users. They also state it costs lots of money and time to develop for each distribution. To which i gotta ask WHY not just make a flatpak or distribute source to let the community package it. Like its kinda dumb to kill it off ive been using zoronOS for 3 years running my laser cutter! And it works bloody great!!!! The last version for linux will be 1.7 which will continue to work forever with a valid liscence. I do not plan to switch back to ~~windows~~ spyware or ~~MAC~~ overpriced Unix. I hope the people at lightburn reconsider in the future, There software is the best software for laser cutters period. And when buying my laser cutter (60watt omtech) i went out of my way to buy one with a rudia controller as it is compatible with lightburn.

--edit just got the email this is what they sent

"To our valued Linux users:

After a great deal of internal discussion, we have made the difficult decision to sunset Linux support following the upcoming release of LightBurn 1.7.00.

Many of us at LightBurn are Linux users ourselves, and this decision was made reluctantly, after careful investigation of all possible avenues for continuing Linux support.

The unfortunate reality is that Linux users make up only 1% of our overall user base, but providing and supporting Linux-compatible builds takes up as much or more time as does providing them for Windows and Mac OS.

The segmentation of Linux distributions complicates these burdens further — we've had to provide three separate packages for the versions of Linux we officially support, and still encounter frequent compatibility issues on those distributions (or closely related distributions), to say nothing of the many distributions we have been asked to support.

Finally, we will soon begin building LightBurn on a new framework that will require our development team to write custom libraries for each platform we support. This will be a significant undertaking and, regrettably, it is simply not tenable to invest our team's time into an effort that will impact such a small portion of our user base. Such challenges will only continue to arise as we work to expand LightBurn's capabilities going forward.

We understand that our Linux users will be disappointed by this decision. We appreciate all of our users, and assure you that your existing license will still work with any version of LightBurn for which your license term is valid, up until LightBurn version 1.7.00, forever. Prior releases will always be made available for download. Finally, your license will continue to be valid for future Windows and Mac OS releases covered by your license term.

If you are a Linux-only user who has recently purchased a license or renewal that is valid for a release of LightBurn after v1.7.00, please contact us for a refund.

Rest assured that we will be using the time gained by sunsetting Linux support to redouble our efforts at making better software for laser cutters, and beyond. We hope you will continue to utilize LightBurn on a supported operating system going forward, and we thank you for being a part of the LightBurn community.

Sincerely,

The LightBurn Software Team

I appreciate that there willing to refund recently bought liscences and all versions up to 1.7 forever instead of DRM bullshit (you gotta buy the newest subscription service) {insert cable guys from southpark} But if your rewriting the framework then why kill off linux??? They said there working on a native arm build for MacOS which knowing apple your gonna half to buy the new macbook cause the old one is old and apple needs your money. So its not anymore of a reason to kill linux

TLDR: there killing linux support because its less than 1% of there userbase and they spend more money and time maintaining the lightburn build.

58 comments

Many of us at LightBurn are Linux users ourselves, and this decision was made reluctantly, after careful investigation of all possible avenues for continuing Linux support.

If y'all use Linux, then how the fuck do you not know about Flatpak, or even AppImage? Christ.
- Read the thread they said they have provided appimage for years.
  
  Agree on the flatpak part tho, that would have solved this issue.
  
  So then why do they think that they must support every distribution? You would think they would jump on the chance to switch to Flatpak. The reasoning is ultimately pretty poor, so hopefully this isn't a shitty cover for some other decision like layoffs.
- As an extremely experienced hardware guy but only a hobby enthusiast developer, could someone explain how AppImage and Flatpak differ?
  
  From my very basic understanding (I have only been using Linux since December), AppImages are single-file executables (kind of like a portable application) whereas Flatpaks are somewhat "distro-agnostic" packages that are sandboxed by default. They're sort of different ways of trying to solve the cross-distribution compatibility issue.
  
  I like Flatpak better on desktop just because it's sandboxed and creates a menu entry automatically. It's generally easier to update a Flatpak too, but a dev could implement an auto-updater in an AppImage release if they wanted to. IMO, when a Flatpak isn't available, AppImages are fine, and you can extract the files from them with the --appimage-extract argument if you want to see what's in there or edit a config.
To our valued Linux users:

Fuck you.

Sincerely,

The LightBurn Software Team
- Oooo I didn’t know Lemmy had automatic translation lol.
same old excuse. all they need to do is shit out a deb and the distros can all figure out their garbage from there
- Just open source v1.7 and let the community make their "openLight" version. They said they're moving to custom libraries anyway, and people would be able to keep buying their products, so doesn't seem like they stand to lose much by going the open source/abandonware route.
- Given my experience with their .debs they're not great at that either. They should have pushed it as a Flatpak or Appimage.
Tell me you are too oblivious to implement CI/CD without telling me you're too oblivious to to implement CI/CD. Their builds and packaging should have been fully automated if it was such a pain. If you can make a Mac version of any software, you can make a Linux version. The debate internally was likely management being dumb as rocks and overruling anyone who actually knows anything.
- I mean the apis are totally different on MacOS, like MacOS is not Linux by any means
  
  Sure, but the CI/CD pipeline would take care of that for you for every single build. You build the pipeline once and then forget about it until Apple makes some breaking change. Meanwhile, you push the code to your repository one time and watch as the machine automatically builds all 50 installers for you in one go AND publishes them for you without having to lift a finger.
- I don't think they're worried about packaging so much as the fact that what works on one distro might be mysteriously incompatible on another
  
  Flatpack it. Done.
I was honestly looking at one. No more.

Are there any open source alternatives?
- I was thinking about switching fron LaserGRBL to Lightburn becausethey had native Linux support... Guess I'll keep LaserGRBL + Wine following the guide in this comment
Crazy to me how developers would rather abandon a project (e.g. the Linux version of their software) than open source it so that the community can continue it. If you're abandoning it then it's not generating profit for you anymore anyway, so literally no reason not to open source it. Oh no, are you worried people will use that to build Windows versions for free instead of paying for a licence? Boo hoo.
- If you can't maintain it let the community do that ESPECIALLY enthusiasts.
- Well that's exactly the worry. Why shouldn't it be? It is their business and livehood.
As a LightBurn user and license holder, this is annoying, but I could see this being a good thing in the long run. Right now, there is very little opensource alternative to LightBurn. As of today, there is a much stronger incentive to make it happen. I'm hopeful this spurs on a modern tool in the open source community that works as an alternative. What LightBurn might have done is save them selves some support overhead and created competition. We'll see how that works out for them.
- Indeed, this would be nice to see. For me, the problem is really that LightBurn is over kill, for a cheap basic machine, you really don't need half of what it offers. Heck, I'd love to see an Android software for lasers, and am surprised that hasn't happened yet.
The only reason I paid for Lightburn in the first place is because it's the only even slightly mature laser software that supports Linux.

Given this news, what are our options?

LagerGRBL seems to be open source, but nobody packages that for Linux as far as I can tell.

And I wasn't able to find anything else when I was looking last year.
- Honestly, Lightburn is hella developed. Even stagnated at its current state, it's still leagues beyond anything else. It'll continue to be a worthwhile purchase for a long time.
- This does not help with Ruida Controllers and fiber Lasers. Both things I have at my company and we don't have any Windows System.
  
  That is such a shame. And since we need to talk over usb, wine will not work either 😞
  
  What about a VM passthrough?
With proprietary software, there's always a chance they'll pull the rug out from under you.
- ...as opposed to open source software, which will be maintained and updated forever, and there will always be people to work on it for free. /s
  
  See, here's the thing about open source, you have the source. You can always compile a discontinued program. You can even update the code if you want. No one can say "You can't run it anymore". I can grab Linux Kernel 0.01 and still compile it. No one will stop me. No one!
Yeah they never were great at Linux support anyway. About 6 years ago I had to teach them that LTS distros like Ubuntu stay on old versions of packages. At the time they built their Linux-x64.deb against Ubuntu 18.04 when Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.0x and thus everything from Mint 17 and on were still under LTS and so a lot of installs out there would see a dependency error.

This is definitely where Flatpak or even Appimage is the real solution.

Well it seems to be time to make a FOSS laser engraver app. Never did really like LaserWeb.
What FOSS alternatives exist? This is exactly the reason not to rely on closed-source for hardware support.
- There’s LaserWeb but apparently it doesn’t support closed source (Chinese) firmware so you’d need to change your laser’s controller…
  
  Might be worth doing some file analysis. The big CO2 laser at my Makerspace has a "proprietary" format that is really just PostScript. Working around that stuff should be doable.
LightBurn should hire better developers then
- But how can they give raises to their execs then?! Think of the poor C-Suite!
It sounds like they're going to rewrite a bunch of code and decided to not invest the capital into Linux.

That's a strange problem to have these days since libraries like this are often designed to run on all platforms, but what do I know.

But if it's true that fewer than 1% of users are on Linux and it's costing them more than other platforms, it makes no financial sense to keep it going.
- I'm no business man (far from that), but 1% sounds like more than 0. (Technically, 1% also tells us nothing about how much money that is.)
  
  Also, "1% of users" is one way of looking at it, but if it's killing 1 of 3 major platforms does not seem like a good default strategic move. Things can change (and are changing) so next time MS does something to f* with their users, I think it can be a good move to be on the user's side, not a major OS's side. (And I don't know anything about laser-cutting communities, but I would guess it has more than average share of creative and tech-savvy people who also like (or need) to have good control of their tech -- I mean, this ain't no spreadsheet app.)
  
  Again, I have no idea what it takes to make laser-cutting SW work, but simple short-sighted common sense seems like a poor excuse.
  
  I have no horse in this race (I barely know what laser-cutting is---I do know a bunch about rpm and deb packaging, FWIW) but I suppose the real reason is on the other side of the equation. But it seems they have to be doing something wrong for it to cost so much that they're willing to go, shrug, and pull their foot back out of the door. (Or they really just thought about the simple maths, and someone felt smart and brave to have do the painful decision.)
  
  By the way, and this is 100% speculation, that "something" could have been an old dependency and/or architectural decision, so if your guess is right, there would probably be no better time to fix it than now.
Doesn't really matter if it's not open source anyway. I prefer something open source without Linux support (that can thus have community builds) than something proprietary with Linux support.
Man i was literally looking into laser cutters like 2 days ago and saw that Lightburn supported Linux. Guess that was short lived.
Reverse engineers have entered the chat
Guess you don't want any Swiss government contracts
Is it time to write a new open source software?
- I'm kinda surprised one doesn't already exist tbh
- Meerk40t has been coming along quite nicely. I've been using it for about 6 months to run both my grbl and fiber lasers.
thats a big hit for non-commercial laser cutting enthusiasts
Between Visicut and Lightburn, the later was miles away even with its quirks and testing all sorts of stuff with boxes.py was a lot of fun

bummer
Honestly they should just make it work in wine.
So all the people still dumb enough to use windows and mac are making companies leave linux
- I think this is a bad take, a take that assumes one is superior for using Linux over proprietary alternatives
  
  No that's true, open source is superior is proprietary
Bummer. Also:

There = over there, that place, rather than here. Also, “There will be time. There are no peaches now. There, there… don’t worry.”
Their = in the possession of them, belonging to them.
They’re = they are.

“They’re going to take their business to the store over there; across the street. There will be no other choice.”

58 comments