Sent to active Linux users on May 14, 2024

I have some difficult news to share: starting July 1st, 2024, we will pause support for our Linux client indefinitely. The client that you have will continue to work as it does today, but we won’t be fixing bugs or keeping it up to date with protocol changes. Our macOS and Windows clients are going strong, and if Tuple is a critical dependency for you, those platforms will always be an option.

This was an incredibly tough decision, and I didn’t make it lightly. I know that lots of you depend on Tuple to do your jobs. I know that this decision may directly impact your ability to interact with your team and get work done.

The reality is we cannot profitably maintain the Linux app. We've seen consistently small and decreasing usage since the initial release and it's been much more expensive than expected, both in terms of time and money.

We're a small, bootstrapped company — we only have a handful of engineers who can support and enhance our native clients. For a while now, we’ve been getting support tickets from frustrated customers who've encountered serious bugs on Linux, and we haven’t been able to resolve them quickly. We know that this is unacceptable, and we owe it to you to be clear about what’s going on.

When we set out to develop a cross-platform engine, as the CTO at the time, I needed to choose between Windows and Linux. I knew very little about both platforms, and I chose Linux. Frankly, I thought it would be more fun to learn, and being a smaller business at the time, I had the freedom to choose what I wanted. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to support in the long run.

We explored a number of options for how to proceed, such as open-sourcing the project and crowdsourcing to help with distro-specific bugs. However, everything we considered came with considerable legal, operational, and technical risk — and it wasn’t even clear if these ideas would yield a better experience for you, our customers.

I am deeply sorry for how this might negatively affect your life in the coming months. I truly hope to give Linux folks a way to Tuple in the future.

– Spencer Dixon, CEO & Cofounder of Tuple