On Friday, October 08, 2010 23:55:07 Warren Young wrote: > I think the explanation is different: they tried for a few years to drum > up support for FB on Linux, too few customers showed up, so they decided > to refocus on the two platforms that do make them money. > > Y'all may recall a different example: Word Perfect was also once offered > on Linux for about a year, then pulled. OpenOffice wasn't even around > at the time, so you can't blame competition. Corel had a near open > field to play in, and still couldn't make a buck. Well, I can add that Wolfram Mathematica has supported Linux since kernel 2.4 days, and still does it. I don't see it backing up because of profit shortage, on the contrary. Another example are the graphics hardware vendors. Both ATI and nVidia do offer support for Linux platforms with their proprietary drivers. They certainly don't find the Linux market profitless. Yet another example is skype, a typical desktop app. They also successfully offer a Linux version, and don't complain about lack of market. The list goes on... :-) I don't believe that profit is the reason why Adobe and others don't offer a Linux version of their products. I would rather say it is incompetence to maintain the code that is portable across OS's. And that says something about the quality of their products and skill level of their programmers, IMNSHO. I think Linux community is actually better off not using any of that crap software, if possible (I wonder why flash player comes to my mind right now...). If their software had been designed and implemented in a way one would expect from a high-class professional commercial company, they would certainly have next to zero problems porting it to Linux and gaining additional market (no matter how slightly bigger, it's bigger nevertheless, and every buck counts). The fact they don't do it shows that they find it hard to maintain their code for a Linux platform. And that is a consequence of bad design and/or implementation of their software, not lack of market. <rant> IOW, Adobe is a bunch of incompetent fools producing second grade low quality pos-software that cannot run correctly on Linux because it is coded so badly that even my grandma would code it better. And my grandma has no experience in programming at all. I'm actually quite baffled how they manage to produce working versions of their products for OS X. That is, _if_ they support Mac at all. </rant> However, if you want/need to use their pos-software, I agree you are better off with a Mac than with a Windows PC. Pos-software running on a decent OS is still better than pos-software running on a pos-OS. :-) Best, :-) Marko