Originally posted by starshipeleven
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For example, National Instruments has chosen to only support Red Hat for their VISA package - I realize that's pretty darn uncommon, but for me that's the one thing keeping me tied to Windows. The software I write is also pretty darn uncommon (it's a huge closed-source package for testing spacecraft), and as it happens right now our distro of choice is Ubuntu - this was chosen by the administrators, not by me, on the grounds of it supporting some weird configuration they really like.
From my point of view, I would really like to deliver my software as a generic "setup.exe" style installer that just works on any distro. I would also very much like to have the VISA package, because honestly I don't see where else we can go in the Windows "Telemetry and Unscheduled Reboots" 10 future. At the same time I'm terrified that NI will say "screw it, we stop supporting Linux altogether but the package still runs as long as it runs" (i.e. locking you into some old Red Hat version).
Of course these are just two examples, but I imagine the same issues arise throughout the software industry. For better or for worse, closed source software is a fact of life, and even if software is open source, distro maintainers are not always going to include every package. For those software vendors, having a unified installation system for all distro's would make it much easier to support Linux.
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