This is part of the Sigil’s website get page. I figured since I was on a roll with Linux and the issues I have with the Linux community I would publish this here too. It explains a lot of my rational as to why I don’t really like or want to be part of the Linux “community”.

As stated Sigil will run on Linux. We try to maintain compatibility with Linux mainly because it’s easy to with Sigil supporting both OS X and Windows and it uses a number of technologies that already support Linux. That said, Sigil is not officially supported on Linux.

For one thing, with the variety of package formats various distros use it’s not possible to maintain packages in every conceivable format. At one time we tired a generic Linux package but that turned out to be unmaintainable. User’s simply did not like nor did they want to use it and some even demanded that if we were going to provide a Linux package we should provide the package in the format used by their chosen distro. The decision was made that if a distro wants to provide packages for Sigil it’s their responsibility to provide those packages.

Further, some Linux distros haven’t been very helpful, interested or willing to contribute their patches back to us in order to make Sigil better. They have taken the approach that they’d rather offer forks of Sigil instead of offering their patches back upstream (to us).

Bugs opened against distros for other projects I maintain have gone unanswered for years. Also, distros often introduce bugs that break functionality due to their own patches. Not to mention my own experience with Linux developers and distros hasn’t been entirely positive.

Basically, my experience with Linux distros and Linux developers has been very negative. I have no interest in helping or being part of a community that calls itself open but in fact isn’t willing to share and frankly isn’t very nice to deal with.

I should clarify that my main issue is with the commercial companies that employ people to work on Linux. Most community run distros I haven’t had any problems with. It’s RedHat and Ubuntu (both either commercial companies or backed by one) who have paid developers where I have run into multiple issues. Debian while community driven is also pretty bad.