Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Adobe Drops Linux Desktop Support For AIR

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #41
    At first I only read half the headline and was like "Oh snaples, shitstorm incoming". But then I finished reading and was like "what the hell is AIR?".

    Comment


    • #42
      Originally posted by mirza View Post
      I am Enterprise programmer and never ever heard about "Adobe AIR". Except now, that it was canceled. Is there anything in AIR that we don't have in standard tools, like Java, HTML5?
      Vendor lock-in and a lack of Linux desktop support. ;-)

      Comment


      • #43
        Originally posted by AnonymousCoward View Post
        Vendor lock-in and a lack of Linux desktop support. ;-)
        And a lot of content creation tools.

        Comment


        • #44
          Originally posted by allquixotic View Post
          The closest we have is Ubuntu's popcon statistics on flash, but since popcon is only enabled voluntarily by people who either (a) know about popcon specifically or (b) click on the very last tab of the Software Sources application, it's a very small, non-representative sample set.
          Unless something has changed, adobe has all the Ubuntu stats. If you take a a look at the Ubuntu flash package it doesn't actually contain the binary. It's just a script that downloads the blob (from adobe servers). I always notice this because it slows down installs and upgrades by having to download during the install phase.

          Comment


          • #45
            It almost sounds like they just don't consider desktop systems in general "hot" anymore, and would drop Windows and Mac OS if they thought they could get away with it.

            Comment


            • #46
              Originally posted by Ex-Cyber View Post
              It almost sounds like they just don't consider desktop systems in general "hot" anymore, and would drop Windows and Mac OS if they thought they could get away with it.
              It's not that there's no money to be found in desktops; there is. The "problem" is that there's such stupendous growth (read: sales volume, consumer spending, new customers) in the smartphone market that everyone wants to be a part of it. Obviously, some director or VP at Adobe has their sights set on making money from the ballooning smartphone market. It's a great market to be in, because not only are existing customers spending more money (upgrading from "dumb" cellphones to smartphones), but you have brand new customers -- billions of them -- springing up worldwide, chipping in for their first cellphone purchase. And they want an Android or iOS or WP7 smartphone right off the bat.

              Adobe might be focusing a little too much on the mobile / smartphone market, to the point of sacrificing or re-allocating developer resources away from the desktops and targeting smartphones instead. They have a massive installed base on desktops and they service a large and steady market in the enterprise sector with Photoshop and the Flash content creation platform (and AIR). If they are going to remove support from the free applications that the content creators depend on to run their content, this will hurt the content creators, because they get fewer users / customers.

              If anyone should be upset about this move, it's not the casual user who doesn't pay anything for Adobe AIR. It should be the people who shelled out literally thousands of dollars to buy the expensive content creation software that lets you write AIR apps. Because a piece of their market share just evaporated. And maybe it's not that case that all AIR apps have the same market share as the overall AIR downloads: perhaps certain apps are extremely popular on non-Windows platforms. I wonder how many Pandora Plus users run Linux? I'd bet you that out of all the Pandora Plus (AIR app) users, it's significantly more than 5% running Linux, just because of the nature of the software.

              Hypothetically, if Phoronix had their own AIR app, you'd see some 50% or more of its users running Linux, BSD, or Mac. For a general purpose platform like AIR, the overall download statistics mean nothing about the user-base composition of each individual application running on the platform. So it's very possible that Adobe just screwed over some app developers who depend on a significant Linux user base (even if, indeed, their total user count is small). That would make me legitimately angry after spending so much money on their content creation tools.

              Comment


              • #47
                Oh no, this means I can no longer run...


                ...come to think of it, everything I use is either coded/scripted in C, C++, BASH, or Perl and there's probably some Python running somewhere on my system, too.

                Hell, I don't think I've encountered any Air apps on Windows, either.

                Comment


                • #48
                  I think it's time to seriously look at getting Android applications running on popular Linux distros. If desktop Linux can run any Android app, we've pretty much solved the chicken-egg problem for the desktop Linux issue.

                  Comment


                  • #49
                    Originally posted by phoronix View Post
                    Phoronix: Adobe Drops Linux Desktop Support For AIR

                    Adobe doesn't see "the year of the Linux desktop" happening, so they've decided to kill off the Linux desktop client for their AIR run-time. Adobe AIR 2.7 was recently released for creating rich Internet applications, but the Linux desktop client wasn't updated. This wasn't an oversight or delay in development, but Adobe is dropping the Linux desktop client so they can focus on mobile platforms such as Android and Apple iOS...

                    http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTU3MA
                    I did not know that they had a Linux Desktop Client for AIR. It occupies a niche market smaller than the Linux desktop market, so I am not surprised that Linux users were not interested in it. I know if I had known, I would not have installed it.

                    Comment


                    • #50
                      Originally posted by Remco View Post
                      I think it's time to seriously look at getting Android applications running on popular Linux distros. If desktop Linux can run any Android app, we've pretty much solved the chicken-egg problem for the desktop Linux issue.
                      That will be difficult. They are made using Google Specific APIs that are not designed for desktop operating systems and they are not designed for larger screen resolutions. Getting them to run would be cool, but there are technical issues that would likely require support from Google in the form of increasing the burden on developers already dealing with Android fragmentation.

                      Comment

                      Working...
                      X