Ubuntu Wiki

Novacut Wiki Home > Supported Platforms

In short, at this time Novacut only "officially" supports Ubuntu. We provide monthly stable releases for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu 12.10, and Ubuntu Raring.

The reason we focus on Ubuntu is it has readily available consumer hardware, which is essential if we're being realistic about who our target user is. When picking the primary platform for Novacut, the decision was between Ubuntu and OSX, not Ubuntu and <insert your favorite distro>.

What Platforms?

Novacut is currently under heavy development by a small team with limited resources, so our only "officially" supported platform is Ubuntu. At this point, the work required to keep our monthly releases working on OSX and Windows, or even on multiple Linux distros, is simply too time consuming. It would slow us down, and wouldn't help Novacut get to OSX or Windows any faster.

Although we're building Novacut with cross-platform compatibility in mind, we're more concerned with first making Novacut amazing on at least one platform. The market is also changing, and it's not clear how much demand there will be for Novacut on OSX and Windows when the time comes. It's telling that EditShare (a company that seems very in-tune with their customer needs) brought their Lightworks alpha to Ubuntu before they brought it to OSX.

However, despite occasional chatter on the Internet to the contrary, Novacut is not deeply tied to Ubuntu and can be trivially ported to other Linux desktop environments and other Linux distros, assuming the needed dependencies are available. Aside from providing the equivalent of some minor Unity-specific UI integration, and possibly the equivalent of org.gnome.SessionManager, no change should be required. We'd happily accept merge proposals to make Novacut and Dmedia work better on your distro or DE of choice.

The current Novacut team doesn't have the time or expertise needed to maintain unofficial packages for other distros, but we'd happily work with the community on this should someone step up to do the work. The most productive thing would be for someone to setup daily builds similar to our current Ubuntu daily builds.

What Ubuntu Versions?

Novacut currently supports Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and newer. We maintain support for Ubuntu versions as far back as we can without requiring an unreasonable amount of work. We supply the needed back-ported packages in our PPA, but we'll only do this as long as they are low risk, unlikely to impact the rest of your install.

We often get asked why we only support very recent Ubuntu versions, and so it's worth explaining here. The reason we do this has little to do with Novacut itself, but rather dependencies.

Novacut started on the cusp of some major platform changes. First, there was the change from the static Python bindings to the introspected API using PyGI, which is the only way you can use Gtk3 and GStreamer 1.0 from Python. Second, there is Python3, the undisputed future of Python, but which is not backward-compatible with the Python 2.x series.

The dust has largely settled on these platform transitions, save for GStreamer 1.0. We currently have back-ported GStreamer 1.0 packages for Precise, as we've been able to do this in a very non-invasive way and with fairly little effort. However, there is a good chance that will change sometime during the Raring cycle. Assuming GStreamer bug 678663 gets fixed, we'd need to back-port newer GI and PyGI, which is simply too invasive and time-consuming.

Assuming we start only supporting Raring and newer, we would likewise drop support for Python 3.2 and only support Python 3.3 and newer. There are a number of extremely attractive features in 3.3 that we'd like to take advantage of ASAP (more POSIX functionality in the os module, Diffie-Hellman key-exchange support in SSLContext, the ipaddress module, etc).

To provide fair warning, note that we plan to drop "official" support for older Ubuntu versions once Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is released. However, we then expect to continue to support 14.04 LTS at least until 16.04 LTS is released.