As a desktop app developer, would you target Mac OS and Linux?
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What are those? :confused:
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I would think a 50 cal. sniper scope would do the job nicely?
I may be schizophrenic, but at least I have each other.
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With hollow-point ammunition, definitely.
Software Zen:
delete this;Yeah I know you windoze boys are sorta jealous of the computational superiority of the *nix architecture ;P
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Yeah I know you windoze boys are sorta jealous of the computational superiority of the *nix architecture ;P
Software Zen:
delete this; -
With hollow-point ammunition, definitely.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Yep. I would. I like targeting multiple platforms because it forces a certain mindset about portability. I find it improves the design and keeps the GUI more separate from the functionality. It also exposes the code to a lot more build environments which can expose subtle bugs. I like building for ARM, IA64 and PPC for the same reasons.
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We target Mac. Linux users have no money, or, at least, prefer not to pay for software
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
This depends on your business model. Red Hat and IBM make a great deal of money from Linux users, but their revenue is not from a product-based model, it is from a services-and-solutions based model. You also miss a huge portion of some markets if you neglect Linux (in particular, mobile and embedded systems). Android, an OS that uses the Linux kernel, has the top market share in mobile--even if the stereotype were even partly true that "linux users don't pay for software" I think it's a pretty safe bet that There is more revene potential for an Android app than for a Windows Phone app ;-)
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Nope, not a big enough audience to justify the extra testing. If people use Wine/Mono/whatever to run it on Linux and it works, good for them. If it doesn't, too bad.
Definitely targeting Windows and OS X in my development efforts. Products such as Real Studio make it a no-brainer. Code the app in your favorite OS then compile for Windows, OS X and Linux.
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I do almost all my development ON Linux, but FOR varying targets. I run my consulting business on all Linux machines and would never EVER go back to Windows (I migrated my Windows 2000 server based setup some years ago to SuSE, then to Ubuntu. Upgrading to Win 2003 and maintaining my MSDN subscription was not financially feasible during lean times). I still do a great deal of work on Windows but Server 2008 and Windows 7 have left me unimpressed for the most part--for what I do they offer little to no value for their cost. Insofar as what I develop FOR, it is in this order: 1. I do not develop for an OS at all, I target frameworks and/or standards and/or languages that are OS-agnostic to some degree (GTK, qt, .NET, (x)HTML, Python, Perl, etc). The OS can then be almost irrelevant as it should be. 2. Upon the (strong) insistence of a customer I'll develop with a specific OS in mind (usually Windows) Generally to be cost-competitive, and because for most customers I have do not have a strong preference, I develop almost exclusivly for Linux for server applications. However the question was about DESKTOP apps market reality is that they have to work on Windows machines. Doesn't mean that they can't be ported to run on other OSes with little to no work. MSFT has one product that us relatively pleasurable to use compared to its competition and that is Visual Studio. The drawbacks are that it only runs on Windows and that it is far too easy to develop an application locked into a Windows-only .NET environment. So, though I miss it, I do not regularly use it (and the only time I CAN use it is on a client's system, since my systems are not Windows).
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Yes, because not all users use windows. Also for those saying that Linux users prefer not to pay, I know plenty of Linux users who do pay and are prepared to pay for good quality software (note I said quality, if you're product isn't better than a free one then what's it worth?). The Humble Indie Bundle is a testament to that fact. My personal opinion is that if you're making software for users in general, i.e. not for internal customers or external customers with very rigid requirements, then you should target as many platforms as possible. Users should choose apps for their OS, not an OS for their apps.
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The company I work for does, because many of our customers are academics. Academics don't like paying for software, but do like spending money on Macs - and not spending money on linux machines :). Linux is more of a server system, but often where there are only one or two users the server is also the machine for viewing the results on. Asking the customers what they use only works up to a point, on the basis that if you only support windows they won't be your customers if they cannot use the software. What you are interested in is how many new customers you would get if you supported a new platform, or how many would leave if you dropped one. My experience is that when one is dropped usually users complain, but as long as there is a viable option they will move. That said there were one or two who got very upset when we dropped support for their decade old irix machine!
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We target Mac. Linux users have no money, or, at least, prefer not to pay for software
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
That's my experience too. I have a Qt application for Windows, Linux and MacOS. Windows makes 98% of the business, MacOs 2%, Linux 0%. The interesting part is that this doesn't reflect the download statistic of the demo version. There is roughly 10% for Linux and less than 2% for MacOs, but virtually nobody buys the Linux version. With that attitude, Linux will never become a mature platform. I'm about to cancel the Linux version. It's only the ease of cross-compiling a Qt project for Linux that makes me releasing to Linux binaries.