Since 20 years, PureBasic runs natively on Linux, using seamlessly specific libraries like GTK, QT, SDL and more. However, as PureBasic is a closed source software, we can only ship a binary package and it can be sometimes difficult to find the right distro to run your PureBasic programs. Every distro can have slightly different binary versions of GTK, QT, libc, zlib etc. and it could prevent PureBasic binaries to run at all.

Up to know, the Linux build servers were upgraded in somewhat chaotic manner, without real rules. For example, the current Linux build servers are running on Ubuntu 17.10 for both x64 and x86 because it was the last Ubuntu version handling x86. The problem is Ubuntu 17.10 was basically only supported for 6 months and then was in support mode for a few more months. Executable created on it are no more compatible with Ubuntu 20.04 or some other recent distros.

To address this, we decided to change way we will support Linux distros. Starting with PureBasic 6.00, we using the following scheme:

– PureBasic for Linux x64 will be available on the 2 last Ubuntu LTS versions (at the time of writing, it means Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS)
– PureBasic for Linux x86 will be available on the latest Debian (at the time of writing, Debian 10). As it is a lot of work, we only support one Debian at once because x86 is loosing traction on Linux distro side (for example, Ubuntu x86 is no more).

What does it means for you, PureBasic programmer ? It should be be easier to choose your dev environment (basically stick to Ubuntu LTS and upgrade it when a new version is released) and the produced executable should run on a wide range of Linux distros (you can even choose to build 2 versions, one on 18.04 LTS, and one on 20.04 LTS if you want to support even more Linux distros).

These 3 new build servers are already up and running, we hope it will solve some of the issues related to the Linux version of PureBasic !