[edflsafoiewq]

I won't buy closed source programs with "Linux ports" anymore for this reason: it seems to always mean "some dev got it working on one Ubuntu version once". The last bug of this form I hit was a program trying to read a hardcoded path that apparently exists on Ubuntu and blissfully segfaulting if it didn't exist...

[wheels]

What you may be missing is that that comes from necessity -- again, for an app like ours, 1% of our users are on Linux. Producing packages for Ubuntu along takes about as much time as producing for Windows and macOS, where almost all of our users are.

Testing and packaging for, say, the top 5 distros would get the effort-per-user to an even crazier extreme -- we'd literally be at the point that supporting a user on Linux takes 200 times more effort than supporting a user on Windows. You either need a very large number of users, or a very large value per use for that to make sense.

For non-OSS projects, most of the time the smart decision is just not to support Linux. I've worked at other pro-audio companies, and they had Linux versions internally that they didn't release because of the support costs.

[jatone]

have you thought about offloading that work to the distributions themselves? I'd be curious to see what say ubuntu would charge for them maintaining your packages for you. you just need to provide a tarball to them.

[saagarjha]

I assume that doesn't work for closed-source software.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I mean, "Linux" isn't enough to target, and in all fairness, if they say it's for Ubuntu then that's what they support. One would hope that they do say they're targeting Ubuntu, of course.