this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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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

Copyright © 2024 LightBurn Software. All rights reserved. "

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.

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[–] [email protected] 125 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Sanguine 58 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Read the thread they said they have provided appimage for years.

Agree on the flatpak part tho, that would have solved this issue.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Sanguine 15 points 3 months ago

No idea, not the Dev and dont even know what product this is lol.. Go read the thread 🤙

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 3 months ago (1 children)

To our valued Linux users:

Fuck you.

Sincerely,

The LightBurn Software Team

[–] AndrewZabar 3 points 3 months ago

Oooo I didn’t know Lemmy had automatic translation lol.

[–] [email protected] 83 points 3 months ago (2 children)

same old excuse. all they need to do is shit out a deb and the distros can all figure out their garbage from there

[–] [email protected] 55 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Given my experience with their .debs they're not great at that either. They should have pushed it as a Flatpak or Appimage.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I mean the apis are totally different on MacOS, like MacOS is not Linux by any means

[–] semperverus 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

As someone who's written pipelines who do exactly that on Windows, macOS, Linux across x86_64, aarch64, and MIPS, with optimized, unoptimized, instrumented for ASAN, instrumented for TSAN, and instrumented for coverage, and does it all in a distributed containerized workflow... It's not as easy as it sounds. Honestly macOS is way more of a hassle to deal with than Linux.

Unless you need ROS. ROS is utter garbage. ROS is popular in robots. ROS is, unlike its name, not actually an operating system but rather a system of tools and utilities which do not follow any standards and certainly not the OS standards. I literally hate ROS. I would burn that shit to the ground and rebuild-the-world if I had the time to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago
[–] [email protected] 49 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I was honestly looking at one. No more.

Are there any open source alternatives?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 42 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

If you can't maintain it let the community do that ESPECIALLY enthusiasts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Well that's exactly the worry. Why shouldn't it be? It is their business and livehood.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] kitnaht 8 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] vapeloki 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

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 😞

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[–] art 28 points 3 months ago (3 children)

With proprietary software, there's always a chance they'll pull the rug out from under you.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago (1 children)

LightBurn should hire better developers then

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

But how can they give raises to their execs then?! Think of the poor C-Suite!

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What FOSS alternatives exist? This is exactly the reason not to rely on closed-source for hardware support.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There’s LaserWeb but apparently it doesn’t support closed source (Chinese) firmware so you’d need to change your laser’s controller…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] nucleative 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] netvor 2 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

Man i was literally looking into laser cutters like 2 days ago and saw that Lightburn supported Linux. Guess that was short lived.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago

Reverse engineers have entered the chat

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

Guess you don't want any Swiss government contracts

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Is it time to write a new open source software?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I'm kinda surprised one doesn't already exist tbh

[–] serp 2 points 3 months ago

Meerk40t has been coming along quite nicely. I've been using it for about 6 months to run both my grbl and fiber lasers.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So all the people still dumb enough to use windows and mac are making companies leave linux

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I think this is a bad take, a take that assumes one is superior for using Linux over proprietary alternatives

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No that's true, open source is superior is proprietary

[–] netvor 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

free & open source model is superior to proprietary, especially for users, and for long term. (funding the dev part is a crazy hard problem, to be fair, but that's true for anything that should benefit users, including roads and health care)

but the point was that the "people still dumb" take assumes that Linux users are superior, which is a bunch of childish BS of course (wasn't probably even meant seriously)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Honestly they should just make it work in wine.

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