UPDATE : Nov 12, 2019 : Serves me right for trying to plan things. So the new roadmap for FileMaker now suggests that there will be an on-premise version of FMS for linux. So we won’t be removing linux support any more.
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Our free BaseElements plugin is one of the most widely used plugins in FileMaker land. One of the reasons for that is the fact that it’s available on all the platforms that FileMaker supports : Mac, Windows, iOS and Linux ( via FileMaker Cloud on AWS ).
However FileMaker has made it clear in their Roadmap and discussions that FileMaker Cloud is the future of their linux offering, and that in the future this won’t support plugins. At this stage it’s not clear if this means FileMaker Cloud for AWS is going to be supported long term.
So at this stage, we’ve made the decision to stop building the BaseElements plugin for Linux, for all releases from 4.2 onwards.
If you’re using the BE plugin on FileMaker Cloud for AWS and want to keep using it, then the 4.0 and 4.1 branches will continue to work just fine, and we’ll back port any critical bug fixes to that branch.
Each platform we include adds time and costs to the build and testing, and linux was the most difficult of all to keep track of, and test on. Given a small adoption, and the added complexity, and our plans for the future of the plugin, it doesn’t make sense for us to keep linux in the offering.
Perhaps though, FileMaker will use the skills and lessons learned from the AWS version to build a real on-premise linux version of FileMaker Server. We can only hope 🙂 Then we’d certainly go back to a linux plugin build.