Things until today have worked reasonably well in Linux - and I appreciate it. With that said, I noticed today that plex media player for linux has not been updated for a long time and is falling far behind the mac and windows versions which are now 3.x versions.
We now have issues with qt5.9.5 which is the plex officially supported library version no longer being in support. The current version is qt5.15
Can we please have an update on what the situation is for development of the linux version of plex media player and maybe some visibility of any forecasted release schedule (while understanding at our end that releases can be delayed).
The roadmap for Mac and Windows isn’t even known. Support is limited to bug fixes on those OSes at this point and there’s been no indication that will continue. It can be assumed Linux support is worse off and likely dead. The HTPC or embedded sector of the market is being told to either:
Use the Plex app for Windows or Mac (Linux is out of luck) with a mouse to control it
Buy a streaming device or TV that supports the Plex app
Outside of that, very little effort is being put forward to make Plex compelling on the Desktop OS side of things. They’ve moved on to focus on streaming devices and people who run Plex on laptops.
Thanks for the update. It’s a pity, but not the end of the world I guess. As long as the server application is maintained and the shield client I will be fine as a work-around.
I find the web client not that great at connecting - but at least I can access the media server via sshfs shared directories and just use any video player.
I imagine they could have had something fairly maintainable across multiple platforms with electron. With that said I am lacking any insight to the internal tech stack/debt.
I hope they succeed as an organisation.
I just find it a little frustrating that companies that heavily use open source don’t pay back to the open source community as much as they could. In this case it is a fair assumption that a fair percentage of Linux users make up a disproportionate number of open source contributors.
My above paragraph is a bit unfair - it seems plex does give back 1% of revenues to charities (which includes EFF - kudos to them for doing this) https://www.plex.tv/about/charity/
Fiscal constraints no doubt make it hard for them to support too many platforms under their current architecture. Hopefully they move to a more platform agnostic framework/architecture in the future to allow them to give wider support.
