Comment on Proton Mail says that the new Outlook app for Windows is Microsoft's new data collection service

• 1995ToyotaCorolla@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I mean, can’t you just package your app in flatpack or even snap? Bam, your app works on 99% of distributions for little effort. That’s what Spotify does, and I’d argue they have even less incentive to support Linux than proton does

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  • JoMomma@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Spoken like someone who has never developed a app package

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  • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t know, I’m not a developer. Lots of companies don’t make their products available on Linux, most cite similar reasoning, so it’s unsurprising. But I agree it’s disappointing. I really wish Linux was more user-friendly.

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  • cley_faye@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Sure, as long as you don’t need any integration with other software, don’t need arbitrary IPC, and actually keep some dependencies in line with some common denominator because there’s only so much you can do with static linking (oh excuse me, distributing the shared libraries in the same package as your binaries as if it’s a new thing) once it reach the “program must actually run” part.

    Flatpack and every other similar solution that are described as “works everywhere” always come with a heck of limitations.

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    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Last in checked email ain’t all that complex, so seems like a good match

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    • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Thunderbird, MegaSync, Bitwarden all distribute as flatpak just fine, and it covers most of the functionality of proton suite.

      Ironically the only two service this list don’t cover: VPN and Protonbridge, are on flathub…

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  • seliaste@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    He also answered this claim, it is right for apps that aren’t stuff like Proton VPN that can’t work in a sandboxed environment. They are working on it iirc

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• mlg@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Variety of distributions doesn’t affect the effort in coding, it adds overhead for package management. Only rarely does it require the developer to add some extra code for either an edge case or some specific library requirement.

  On top of that, Flatpak and AppImage exist to solve this issue if you don’t want to deal with it.

  This is a pretty rich statement coming from Proton who has very publicly given out “private” info about its users to law enforcement without even so much as a hint of resistance. I doubt they would want to spend any resources on cross platform if they don’t even back up their claim about true privacy.

  Even zoom has a lazy script that packages their app in literally every possible format possible because it runs the exact same on every distro. It is not that hard. Literally the only way this doesn’t work if you hired some 3rd party MSFT dev to create some insane C++ app with pure Windows API calls instead of using a library.

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• GoodEye8@lemm.ee ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think the bigger issue is the variety of distros that end up not being compatible. Even if you overall have a lot of Linux users if they, for the sake of argument, distribute evenly between all distros then it’s still a lot of effort to code. The only difference is that the argument will change from “Linux has a small userbase” to “Distribution X has a small userbase”.

  Linux doesn’t just need more users to be worthwhile to develop for, it also needs a distro agnostic solution to run software. That or significantly reducing (or streamlining) the amount of distros so the developers would have far less configurations to account for.

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  • Euphoma@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Flatpaks and nix packages work on pretty much every distro.

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  • helenslunch@feddit.nl ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That’s why I mentioned both 🙂

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