Linux support...

[meix]

is it gone forever or could it also be a part of miraculous rebirth?

[Stan]

Unfortunately, I believe it's gone forever, yeah. Why? See this video where the creator of Linux himself explains the situation with desktop application support:

[eok]

Unfortunately, I believe it's gone forever, yeah. Why? See this video where the creator of Linux himself explains the situation with desktop application support:

And yet, Blender and Blender LTS
And yet, GIMP
And yet, Davinci Resolve
And yet, Krita
And yet, ...

I'm an old Linux/Unix 'tech geezer too, so I can totally relate to his words. But the actual fact is, for better or worse (worse, if you are a Linux purist) that Snap & Flatpack distribution technology has made Linux desktop App development & distribution so much easier.

I mean, seriously, the Blender team can consistently provide robust & regular Linux releases that are virtually always in step with their Windows releases - for some time now, so...

[SimplSam]

And all of those apps are free (or have free versions).

How much money do you think is in the Linux market for Moho? and how much would it cost to re-introduce Moho to the platform after 10+ years?

[synthsin75]

Free or not, those apps have much larger development teams than Moho, which is currently one man. Even when Moho had a larger team, it was still dwarfed by every one of those.

[eok]

I started experimenting with Moho back around 2001, when Moho versions were released for BeOS and Windows. Then BeOS was dropped for MacOS. I think around 2004 Moho began including releases (5.x) for Linux and continued through 2007 or so.

Back then, it was a huge challenge to develop desktop graphics apps for "Linux". One big reason was because of variations in the various flavours of Linux. That is, different versions of Linux used differing graphics drivers, window managers, runtime library versions, etc. A developer could try and target a single Linux version to simplify things - like Ubuntu - but even variations in Ubuntu releases could be a nightmare too. For example, if you search my past posts (there are not that many) you'll see one where I show how to get Moho 5.x to work on Ubuntu 18.04. It's a pain end users ever have to resort to this kind of thing to keep the apps they've paid for running on updated operating systems.

How much would it cost to develop a Linux version? Well, a heck of a lot less than what it cost back in the days before snaps and flatpacks. Those technologies virtually remove dependencies on the host OS for apps to run. It does require the developer to engineer the application build to - amongst other things - pull all app dependencies into the snap/flatpack runtime image. That's basically how snaps and flatpacks work: all the libraries and resources needed by the app are in the runtime image. If you're a coder: imagine statically linked executables on steroids. An oversimplification but it gets the basic strategy across.

There are a number of commercial Linux apps that seem to be priced well enough for the developer. Folks will pay if there is quality and serves their needs. In the 3D graphics production arena, a good number of Blender users are using Linux based Blender. I believe the number of commercial Blender plug-ins is growing too. I mean, users are willing to spend up to a few hundred USD to get their hands on a great plug-in and use that plug-in on their free Blender install.

Windows 10/11 is proving to be too much of an erratic moving target. Folks are looking for stability in their production pipelines and (believe it or not) some versions of Linux have a distinct edge in this regard.

I actually haven't looked much into snap/flatpack coding, but I can imagine there's some degree of abstraction layers to handle display, I/O, etc. Just download install something like a Blender or Krita flatpack on your Linux of choice and test. The display & I/O performance is great.

One last point is that Moho is kind of a niche app. It's market is pretty specific and caters to a pretty specific kind of customers. The vast majority of home & hobby users clearly still rely on MacOS and Windows. Professional users and operations are a different story and often driven by workflow/pipeline requirements - many rely on Linux to varying degrees. The thing is, I'm no longer 100% confident with Windows' reliability any more. I see any app/functionality I can move to Linux as a big win - at least for me.

[aplanebagel]

Would using wine or bottle to install moho 14 on linux be worth it ? Has anyone tried ? I don't want my Win 10 machine to become e-waste but it can run moho so if I could set it up on linux I'd be doing the planet a favor.

[happycrazywild]

Would using wine or bottle to install moho 14 on linux be worth it ? Has anyone tried ? I don't want my Win 10 machine to become e-waste but it can run moho so if I could set it up on linux I'd be doing the planet a favor.

I'm not sure, but since Moho is a GPU-heavy application, your best bet would probably be Bottles. It has a lot of graphics-related compatibility features (for gaming, etc).
I find that its "virtual desktop" feature often helps with apps that don't want to play nice launching in their own Linux window.
You could also try adding it to Steam for Linux as a non-Steam game and enabling the Proton compatibility feature.