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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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 funbummer
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.
Guess you don’t want any Swiss government contracts
@Steamymoomilk At the very least, they could create deb & or rpm packages. They also have the option to use flatpak, snap, or appimage…
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.
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-extractargument if you want to see what’s in there or edit a config.
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.
No idea, not the Dev and dont even know what product this is lol… Go read the thread 🤙
They mention retooling to another library. I’m guessing they’re doing a UI rewrite and the chosen library isn’t Linux compatible. Since saying that will obviously bring valid criticisms of “why not choose a better library?”, they choose to blame something else. And the reason they chose that library is likely because of office politics rather than technical.
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
same old excuse. all they need to do is shit out a deb and the distros can all figure out their garbage from there
Given my experience with their .debs they’re not great at that either. They should have pushed it as a Flatpak or Appimage.
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.
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.
To our valued Linux users:
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
The LightBurn Software Team
Oooo I didn’t know Lemmy had automatic translation lol.
Reverse engineers have entered the chat
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!
Is it time to write a new open source software?
Meerk40t has been coming along quite nicely. I’ve been using it for about 6 months to run both my grbl and fiber lasers.
I’m kinda surprised one doesn’t already exist tbh
