LightBurn, the defacto software for hobbyist laser cutters and engravers, was built as a multi-platform solution so it could be used on a wide variety of platforms. But in a recent email announcement sent out to users, they announced they would no longer be distributing their software for Linux systems.

Why? The developers claim that too much of their time was being spent supporting and packaging Lightburn software for Linux distributions relative to the size of the user base.

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.

They’ve apparently tried multiple distribution mechanisms designed to fix these issues such as flatpack and appimage – but still encountered too many problems.

It’s a reminder that the entire ecosystem must be healthy for your software to be healthy. [Hackaday]