alt Hacker NewsMicrosoft gave up on teams for linux, the app that's available now is a community electron webapp wrapper, and Zoom isn't electron at all, its QT but they chose the path of only supporting a few distros (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, RedHat) and they also don't rely on system QT versions, they vendor it.
If your app is open source, I say just build & test on one of the major distros and let the community port it to others. If its closed source, well, good luck. But if what the parent said is true, that you now collect a bunch of very vocal pissed off customers because you didn't support their favorite distro, then its just not worth it at the current marketshare that desktop Linux has.
There's also the challenge of you just can't make any assumptions about what may be present or not on someone's Linux machine, even with the major distros.
Replies
According to the latest SO dev survey Ubuntu has 28% market share among developers. Considering coding seems to be the one place LLMs have found product market fit, I’m not sure how you can make the argument that the market share is too small. For other companies, absolutely. For ones marketing towards developers, seems like a mistake.
Using a largely-stock Ubuntu desktop for work the past 6 years, Zoom has also been one of the most broken mainstream apps I've every used on any system ever. I appreciate they provide a native Linux option, but it has consistently been barely functional—often fully unusable to where I'd join important calls from the browser instead.