Personally I disagree with the "Major version upgrades". To me that what I want, you release a product, I buy it knowing what it contains and what it does. My expectations are that I get security fixes for some period of time, but other than that the "no new features" is a feature all on its own.
I might be in the minority, but I'd pay $150 up front, rather than a $8 per month, knowing full well that I might need to pay another $100 the next time macOS is updated. It's not the money as much as it is the mental overhead of yet another subscription.
Customers need to be able to keep track of their subscriptions and after four or five that's it, you lose track and the money just disappear out of your account every month. Say that: Well the App Store lists all your subscriptions... is missing the point, because not all of my subscriptions are going to be centrally managed by Apple, Google or some one else. Again, it might just be me, but I believe that companies are losing out on sales because they're not offering straight up purchases. There's just no way to track sales lost because of it, so it's not on anyone's radar.
Edit: I checked the pricing on VMWare Fusion, it was release in 2020, it might have been cheaper on release, but let's assume it's not, that's $199 up front, I'd still be able to us it and I'm saving money. I can then upgrade it for $99, but I don't have to, unless I also upgrade my laptop to an M-series. So it's cheaper for me to buy an objectively better product. I might even get a discount if I buy bulk licenses or I'm already a VMWare customer. I get why subscriptions are attractive to the developers, but they provide no value to the customer.
> but I've explained why in the "Why a subscription?" box here
No you haven't, you've just regurgitated the usual argument made by people peddling subscriptions.
Its always the same old story, and charities do the same thing when seeking donation subscriptions...
The person selling the subscription says "oh, but its only $8 a month that's only half a Starbucks coffee"
Meanwhile, the REALITY for the person on the receiving end of the salesdroid is always the same ...."your sub is not the only thing going on with my life bud".
And its very true in IT, sub to this for $x, sub to that for $y, sub to that for $z, and soon enough you are "talking real money" as the old saying goes. And then if you are expecting the company to pay for an employee then that adds up exponentially in-line with the number of employees.
So, yeah, subscriptions suck ... for a real and valid reason.
Appreciate the transparency. Fwiw, I don't understand from the FAQ what's your opposition to jetbrains model, which has been universally praised for its friendly compromise of user vs developer needs. As the other commenter mentioned, a) subscriptions get too many and b) subscription model means I have to keep paying forever. It makes it crystal clear I am not buying and I am not owning my tool.
(that being said, I always appreciate and recognize the freedom of producer to charge whatever model they choose to, there's no moral qualms here:)
And maybe it is! We'll have to see how this all works out. I could very well be wrong about that.
In my opinion, JetBrains' perpetual fallback model is more of a psychological thing than something you'd actually utilize — at least I'd never consider staying on an old version myself, but maybe that's just me.
I've also talked to other devs, who mentioned that users staying on ancient versions because they don't want to pay again can be a major support burden.
One thing worth considering is that I plan to offer (optional) cloud services integrated into the app.
OrbStack is also relatively high-maintenance due to all the components it bundles.
It's not that, it's like others have said up the thread – the mental overhead of subscriptions is super annoying. (Sure, not if it was the only subscription you have, but it isn't.)
I let Jetbrains lapse a lot. But certainly not when I am actively using it. If I start using it regularly again (which I do, intermittently over the years) then I subscribe again.
But the thing is, that also solves the elephant in the room that devs don't want to talk about: a huge portion of subscription revenues comes from providing absolutely no value at all to customers. It's people paying for a subscription, being too busy to notice the charges -- or worse, too busy to figure out how to cancel them even thought they do notice, and mean to.
And devs can claim this is ethical, because they disclosed the subscription recurrence, and the responsibility lies with the customer to track all their subscriptions diligently, across all their platforms and billing methods, and cancel them whenever they stop using them.
And some people do that. But most do not.
So the other way to look at it is that subscription software models are just a scam. A way to exploit people who lack the organization, or have two jobs and kids, or whatever — and get money out of them without providing any value at all. For months, or even years in many cases. Of course it is great for your bottom line. But is it ethical? Even if you think it is, is it a cool thing to do?
I think both arguments make sense. It is debatable.
But personally, I would only want to do subscription billing if I had some means (perhaps via opt-in telemetry) to automatically detect when the product hasn't been used at all during the billing period, and not charge anything in those cases.
Crazy for what seems to be an alternative GUI for Docker. It's almost as much as we pay for Parallels licenses so we can use Vagrant on Apple Silicon. There's nothing "slow and clunky" about these VMs either.
Of course, you're free to build your own with a VM and at least a couple months of full-time work to get the same feature set, just like with Dropbox :) Not saying it's for everyone.
1) Runs containers / VMs ("linux machines"). Here you get a linux instance with access to your complete filesystem (everything is mounted), similar to I guess WSL
2) Full docker compatible + docker-compose
3) As of this week kubernetes support
Everything is blazing fast to start (think 100-200ms). Aside that, there's one thing that's awesome: networking.
Every container gets a unique IP. No more portmapping.
Every containers also gets a unique hostname (+ip) -> testapp.orb.local
Every every docker-compose gets a unique subdomain -> web.testcompose.orb.local
I think you'll find something you like in there :) To name a few: Performance, CPU usage/power efficiency, automatic domain names for containers, access to volumes and image files from macOS, native app, and more.
Hey, I just switched from Linux to MacOS and I wondered how to best set up a work environment on MacOS.
I don't really want to use brew as the sandboxing on MacOS seems to be much worse than I expected it to be e.g. as far as I see you can only prevent the access of $HOME/Desktop, $HOME/Documents and $HOME/Downloads.
I found out that using Canonical Multipass allows you to easily set up ubuntu VMs and this I think it is a good way to create a working environment for development and of course by using it one can improve the sandboxing as everything is executed inside a vm.
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Now to come to the point your OrbStack seems to be really similar to Canonical Multipass,
so I wondered how they do they compare to each other?
Why should I prefer to use OrbStack over Canonical Multipass (besides the possibility of being able to run other distributions than ubuntu)?
Hasn't been that common of a request, and honestly I've never used Vagrant so not familiar with its benefits. People are already using OrbStack machines and its "orb" command to build dev envs with setup scripts, and cloud-init support will also be added: https://github.com/orbstack/orbstack/issues/38
I think cloud-init will be more useful since it's already widely used for setting up servers, whereas Vagrant is only for dev envs, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Plenty of companies use Vagrant. OrbStack's pricing is almost as much as an annual Parallels license for each of our devs. Most places using Vagrant will be using VirtualBox on Intel, or Parallels on Apple Silicon. So you haven't seen many requests because Vagrant users already have a solution and OrbStack wouldn't save enough money to ever switch to it.
As much as I think you should support Vagrant in your tool, that isn't the point I was making - whether it's worth supporting is something you need to decide for yourself.
The point I was making is this:
Your claim is
> No matter the use case, OrbStack has you covered with features
But you don't support a common, cross-platform tool that's been around for ages and is used for managing developer environments - including running containers.
Can you give an example? OrbStack currently sets up an IPv4+6 interface linked to a "unified bridge" with both the macOS host and other Linux machines on it, plus NAT to the outside world: https://docs.orbstack.dev/machines/network
You're also free to create your own interfaces on the Linux side, of course.
Great to hear! Quick question for you actually: what's the value prop of having VMs and containers in one? I've been having a hard time with that from a marketing perspective.
