Releases
Currently ElectrumSV only builds releases for Windows and MacOS. It is expected that Windows users are using at least Windows 10, and MacOS users are using 10.15 or later. We intentionally do not provide either Linux builds or support any form of packaging, and Linux users are expected to get it running from source.
Some of the reasons we do this are intentional, and others are technical limitations that are either imposed by our build environment or the dependencies we use. This document is intended to detail those reasons, both for reference by our users and developers.
Platforms
Developer resources are limited, and we need to focus it where it matters. This is the main reason relating to our platform-related release choices. Even if a community member contributes changes to add support for dated platform versions, accepting those changes can impose heavy ongoing costs on developer time and even unacceptable limitations on development for recent platform versions.
Windows
ElectrumSV Windows builds are for Windows 10 or above. It is possible they work on earlier versions of Windows, but we will neither test that it works or make unreasonable changes to keep it working.
MacOS
ElectrumSV MacOS builds are currently limited to 10.15 and above.
Build environment
Our releases are made in our CI environment provided by Microsoft. The release build the CI environment creates currently requires MacOS 10.15.
Dependency: Qt
ElectrumSV uses the Qt user interface package. Each updated version of Qt requires more and more recent versions of MacOS. At the time of writing, we use 5.15 but we plan to update to 6.1 when we get the time.
Linux
ElectrumSV does not provide any builds or packages for Linux.
People have offered to contribute code to support various Linux packaging systems, but we have had to refuse that. It is very little work to take in that code and produce those packages, but it too much work to test them and verify they work on all the different Linux distributions. We will never accept Linux packaging support for this reason.
What we would be willing to accept, is AppImage support, where the AppImage build runs on at least all mainstream Linux distributions without any extra work. Unfortunately, there has been no interest from Linux users on working on this and contributing that code. The ElectrumSV developers will need to produce the builds, test them and polish them - so there are quality requirements.
Important
Do you want ElectrumSV to have AppImage support for Linux? Get in touch with the ElectrumSV developers and work out what we require in any acceptable solution.