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Comment by hobarrera | Hacker News Reader

There's something that quite surprised me: being a software company: how is it that you've never gotten around to a Linux client? Do most of you use the web-version, or is dropbox mostly windows-centric (sorry, I'm quite ignorant about dropbox team's culture. :D )

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There is a Linux desktop client, although it isn't mentioned on the front page with the other clients.

From https://zulip.org/clients.html:

> There's a Linux client, but we don't have binaries posted yet. We hope to have a PPA setup soon.[0] In the meantime, you can clone the git repo[1] and build from source.

[0]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-desktop/issues/1

[1]: https://github.com/zulip/zulip-desktop

It's mostly a WebKit wrapper, just like the Mac and Windows clients, but it does provide an icon and a dedicated window and potentially better integration with system notifications etc.

Most tech companies (doubly so in the Bay Area) develop on Macs and deploy (servers) on Linux. There'd be little pressure to develop a Linux client since most devs are spending their day on a Mac.

That's probably not true[0]. In my experience you would often endure belittling or sheep calls, even bullying, if you walk into the office with a MacBook or an Iphone. We've customers where it's not even allowed to store corporate secrets on non-linux os. But that are highly professional financial or insurance dev corporations.

[0] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

I'm confused about what the linked dataset is supposed to show as it doesn't seem related. In any case, I've certainly noticed ancedotally that MacBook usage is quite high.

Everyone at my work (a big company) has Linux desktops. Granted we wouldn't use Zulip, or anything else hosted externally for that matter, but this does create a large demand for other types of software running on a Linux desktop from us, e.g. IDEs.

Google Drive doesn't even work on Linux. Linux Desktop will never be more than a VM host or Web Browser host.

I've been using linux on workstation for last 6 years. I have to run VM with Windows, only when i have to interact with some Microsoft product directly. It may not be ideal solution for every use case, but it works.

> Google Drive doesn't even work on Linux.

Completely true.

> Linux Desktop will never be more than a VM host or Web Browser host.

I did mention this on a developer-specific context. AFAIK, most developers tend to use Linux nowadays - at least in all the companies I've been in during the last 10 years, windows users have always been a minority.

(YES, I'm perfectly aware that this is not true for average users, or anything outside IT).

Zulip can be hosted internally, and there is a desktop Linux client in addition to running fine in the usual zoo of Linux web browsers.

From what I see, zulip-desktop appears to have Linux support...

https://github.com/zulip/zulip-desktop

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