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  "publishedAt": "2026-05-23T23:07:44.000Z",
  "site": "http://forum.palemoon.org",
  "textContent": "> That's all. Also, put lots of bright shiny colors on your home page, and make your Linux Downloads page look like a simplified version of Veit Kannegeiser's Downloads page - a command for getting his key, a command for adding his repo to your source list, and instructions on running 'apt update' and 'apt install palemoon'. This is what all the big browsers do, since almost all the users are on some form of Debian or Ubuntu. People don't want to come to a Downloads page and say to themselves, \"oh man, I have to figure out a freaking tarball?\" Just being honest.\n\nI mean, I've wondered about that myself... creating the tarballs is easier, but most projects targeting Linux seem to create .deb for Debian and derivatives, but also .rpm for Fedora and derivatives. That does leave every other Linux distro that doesn't do things the Fedora/RHEL way or the Debian way out in the cold, but it seems to be industry standard practice. I likely would have created .rpm and .deb packages for Pale Moon, saying they're compiled for Debian/Ubuntu and Fedora/RHEL, and hopefully work on any other distros that ship .deb or .rpm packages, but if not, too bad. The tarball thing is admittedly not what I would have picked if I were creating a project like this myself and had no influence from established precedent here. I do that for Epyrus in part because that's just the way UXP applications do things, but before I came here, yes, .rpm and .deb packaging would have been my instinct. In fact, we do have Linux users that do their own .deb packages for the community... but that's considered a community build, not something we ship officially, because that's just one user packaging something for their own distro as a one-off thing, not something generic that would work across Linux distros.\n\nSometimes it feels like we're kinda screwed if we can't get distros to ship us in their repos. Which is honestly how I suspect it is on Linux sometimes. The distros want to ship our package their way, using their system libs, and just have us be completely hands off, or else they won't touch it if we need things done differently. Combine that with reputational issues, and that's just not happening. Ultimately, I would say that's one of the things I don't like about Linux. It feels like it was a \"walled garden\" of sorts long before Android and iOS were, with users usually getting their stuff from a repo owned by their distro and compiled for their specific thing, and the developers having no say in how it's packaged or what kind of experience users get because the distro compiles the binaries and ships them their way. It means repos are gatekeepers like Google is with Android, only they are less professional and will reject us for petty reasons or reasons we don't think are valid. And the users... trust their distro and want to use those repos, being hesitant to add a third-party repo. I think Android resembles a Linux distro a lot more than most would like to admit. A centralized Play Store (repo from your distro) people get most of their stuff from, but you can also download other app stores (like adding a third-party repo). Smartphone companies seemingly just took that model, locked it down a bit more, and commercialized that type of trust when creating their stores.\n\nI think part of the issue is our project is just not very... compatible with the Linux way of doing things. We don't really have a lot of respect for distros and their role as repo gatekeepers that most in the Linux community seem happy to accept, we don't particularly want to change how we do things to accommodate them, and they also aren't going to change how they do things to accommodate us. I feel like succeeding on Linux would probably require us to be very hands-off regarding branding and use of system libs, and just generally allow people to ship anything and call it Pale Moon. The open source community... doesn't like rules. And the whole \"no rules\" approach isn't really our way. There are seemingly fewer Linux users of Pale Moon relative to desktop Linux marketshare, which is already a low number. Our users are disproportionately on Windows, Linux people just... don't like the vibe of this project and honestly we sometimes don't like the vibe of Linux users because it seems like they aren't keen on letting application maintainers control branding or user experience, and want open source to mean nearly public domain a lot of the time. Sometimes I do wonder how successful we would have been on Linux if we just didn't give a crap what anyone did with our application... but we're just not that kind of project, and sometimes it seems like that's what it takes to win on Linux.\n\nI will just admit this... I was a Windows Phone user for a long time and used to hang around in Microsoft fan circles up until about 2018. I'm familiar with the Microsoft way, and what a lot of Microsoft shops do. And the truth is... I felt a lot more at home here in the Pale Moon community than I did around basically any other open source project. But sometimes I wonder if some of the very things that make this place feel like home and that cause me to naturally respect it, are exactly why many Linux users dislike it. I would have to admit I'm likely very different from the average Linux user. It's just not... a good cultural fit for me. LOL.\n\n\n> I don't know much about how Windows users get software, maybe you are already doing that right and they just need to stop hearing anything related to Firefox.\n\nThat I'm pretty confident Moonchild is handling right, we distribute our own .exe files, and even have a listing in the Windows store, though honestly most Windows users don't use the Windows Store, it wasn't too hard to get Microsoft to list us in it just in case.\n\n> This is just marketing 101 kind of stuff. I may be wrong on some of my assumptions, but probably not. Who among us has ever known a long-term, commmitted openBSD home desktop user? Who among us has ever known a mypal user who wasn't an XP extremist (or we ourselves were trying it to get internet access on an XP box)? The long-term plummeting, cratering, death spiral Firefox user base numbers speak for themselves, and even THEY claim \"latest, greatest, most private, secure thing ever\" to try to prop themselves up, but hardly anyone is buying it any longer.\n\nI don't think you're wrong, for what it's worth. I see where you're coming from, I'm just not sure how we'd go about addressing these things without losing our identity or becoming a totally different project. Maybe Pale Moon should not do Linux itself, and someone with a better understanding of the Linux community should build their own browser on top of UXP and ship that, no association with us? That's the only way I can think of to promote UXP on Linux... do something like a Linux equivalent of what dbsoft is doing with White Star and his own forum, maybe Green Penguin or something with Tux in the name? LOL.\n\n* * *",
  "title": "General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-23T23:07:44.000Z"
}