Post #3511799

2026-06-29 18:05 UTC

@mafe@layer8.space @ercanbrack@mastodon.online It's been a very tricky space predominantly because there's no such thing as "Linux" only "Linuxen". So you end up having to support a wide range of slightly different contexts. Things are a lot better in this new Pipewire world though - so there is hope. However, unless you're doing the AppImage thing you have to find a maintainer for each distro you want to support and ideally setup CI runners for the full matrix of possible Linuxen.

Replies (4)

@mafe@layer8.space 2026-06-29 18:09

@samaaron@mastodon.social @ercanbrack@mastodon.online Totally different pain point you might not consider for Audio software is the fragmentation on UI libraries. Nowadays two distinct window servers, X Window Server and Wayland Compositor, make it somewhat hard to run on every platform. Good to know pipewire is the de facto audio standard, thx!

Open ##3511800
@mafe@layer8.space 2026-06-29 18:11

@samaaron@mastodon.social @ercanbrack@mastodon.online Looks like you have 4 maintainers for Sonic-Pi on NixOS/nixpkgs, which is good. Their idea of shared sandboxed libraries is great, but renders nearly every prebuilt binary unusable. (Bad for script kiddies, though.)

Open ##3511802
@PaulDavisTheFirst@fosstodon.org 2026-06-29 19:08

@samaaron@mastodon.social @mafe@layer8.space @ercanbrack@mastodon.online worth noting that for audio plugin developers, system audio I/O APIs like Pipewire are absolutely, fundamentally and completely irrelevant, since the plugin host takes care of all that stuff. Sadly not so true for GUI technologies.

Open ##3511803
@sobek@social.linux.pizza 2026-06-30 05:52

@samaaron@mastodon.social @mafe@layer8.space @ercanbrack@mastodon.online If you depend on any dynamically linked libraries. If you can ship a statically linked, self contained binary, it will run anywhere.

Open ##3511810