It’s Impossible to Be Fully Compatible with Linux
Unfortunately, unlike Windows and macOS, where there is a very short list of possible versions, the API changes very conservatively, and backwards compatibility has been maintained for decades, the situation with Linux looks like total chaos. There are hundreds of distributions, each with a unique set of libraries, kernel versions, components, and so on. And also there are many more different package managers, etc. This chaos is the price of freedom and openness. There is no single standardization, which means there is no way to guarantee at least some kind of compatibility with all possible distributions and assemblies.
Linus Torvalds himself, the legend and creator of OS Linux, has repeatedly said that creating custom applications for Linux is a nightmare. This requires building a version of it for a bunch of different popular distributions. He even publishes his own hobby app for only a small number of distributions. Here is his famous speech under the telling title “why the Linux desktop sucks”.
Tonfotos strategy for Linux support
Tonfotos is still a very young project and is in a phase of rapid growth. We just can’t afford to spend prohibitively large resources on improving compatibility with an OS that is used by less than 1% of our users, taking them away from developing cool new program features. Therefore, we are forced to limit ourselves to a simple approach:
- We still do not refuse support for this OS.
- All cross-platform features appear automatically in this release, but special features that require separate development to run on Linux come with the lowest priority. For example, on Linux, automatic import of photos from a smartphone is not supported.
- We have chosen Ubuntu as our reference platform. It is, if not the most popular, then certainly one of the most popular distributions in the world, with a very simple installation, feasible for ordinary users.
- We build and test the application only on this platform. As far as possible, we try to help all users, but if this requires debugging on some separate distribution, or even building a separate version, then we simply declare that there is no support for compatibility with this distribution.
Address to the community
The policy chosen above is a forced measure. This does not mean that we would not want our program to be used by everyone who only wants to. But we don’t and probably never will have enough resources to ensure full compatibility with all possible distributions. And even more so, we will never have enough expertise to solve compatibility problems on all these platforms.
Therefore, we want to reach out to users and encourage them to help each other on this forum, which is completely in the spirit of Linux, to share tips and experience overcoming compatibility issues. And in order to make it as convenient as possible for everyone, we suggest that we together keep an up-to-date compatibility table in this thread so that each new user can quickly understand whether it is worth expecting normal compatibility of the Tonfotos application with and version of the Linux distribution. I think this can make life much easier for many Linux users.
Please write in the comments about any (positive or negative) experience of running Tonfotos on your OS, with the obligatory indication of the version of both the distribution kit and Tonfotos
Actually, the compatibility table
Works without problems:
- Ubuntu 18 is the OS that Tonfotos is built on
- Ubuntu 22 - on this OS Tonfotos is being tested by developers
Known Issues
… Looking forward to your feedback!
