That’s missing the point by focusing on a proof of concept. It’s a very long way from showing a mostly-cross-platform OSS tool, to being an ISV that provides technical support and maintenance for a significant commercial application, for millions of nontechnical users, with legacy support, on a mercurial set of cross-platform moving targets.
To a product manager, this looks like a black hole where money and engineering/tech support resources get chewed up with very little value creation to show for it.
It’s also how some very mediocre distributions became enterprise standards for Linux - their value proposition basically being, “we’re not a moving target, and the Fortune 500 can buy a maintenance contract from us”. But this only happened in server land, where the hardware ecosystem isn’t so chaotic.
"significant commercial application": you have no idea how many downloads or users of Ardour there are.
"mercurial set of cross-platform moving targets": precisely what is addressed.
"nontechnical users": that's a new constraint not present in the original description, but probably not much of an issue if you're discussing a specialized tool rather than a "desktop" application.
"hardware ecosystem": completely irrelevant to the case in question.
Looking past the ridiculous hostility; the case in question is why it’s super rare to target Linux for desktop applications. The example offered has none of the trappings of a commercial offering.
By all means, though, all the best with your startup.
It's a 21 year old project that nets in excess of US$200k/year, and has been the basis of 3 commercial spinoff products. Not a large scale commercial project, certainly, but not a startup.
The question wasn't "why it’s super rare to target Linux for desktop applications". It wasn't a question at all, in fact. It was an assertion that it's hard to package 3rd party applications for Linux, and I am asserting that this claim is incorrect.
As to whether or not the packaging situation explains why it's super rare to target Linux for desktop application, that is indeed a different question, with multiple answers.
To a product manager, this looks like a black hole where money and engineering/tech support resources get chewed up with very little value creation to show for it.
It’s also how some very mediocre distributions became enterprise standards for Linux - their value proposition basically being, “we’re not a moving target, and the Fortune 500 can buy a maintenance contract from us”. But this only happened in server land, where the hardware ecosystem isn’t so chaotic.