An apology to Linux users
In case you're here for the first time: fman is a file manager for power users. It launched last week. The launch exploded completely. fman made it into the top 10 on Product Hunt and was on the front page of Hacker News for 13 hours. 15,000 people saw it for the first time.
Despite the positive reception, several Linux users pointed out that fman had committed a complete no-go in the Linux world.
fman is young and many features you would consider basic are still missing. To let you receive these features as they come out, fman includes a mechanism for automatic updates. If you're interested in the details of this mechanism, please see this page.
On Linux, fman enables automatic updates by integrating with your system's package manager (eg. Synaptic/APT). That's good. But the no-go I committed was to also install a cron job that runs every day as root to check for updates to fman.
Linux users like to have complete control over their systems. They don't want any "shady" things to happen in the background. As a Windows and (recent) Mac user, this is what I failed to understand.
I just released version 0.3.1 of fman that removes the cron job on Linux and
lets you update fman via Synaptic/APT at your own schedule. If you have
version 0.3.0 of fman installed, remove it (including the cron job!) via
sudo dpkg --purge fman. Then download and install the current
version from the Download page. To
verify that the cron job has been removed, see that
/etc/cron.daily/fman does not exist.
Michael started fman in 2016, convinced that we deserve a better file manager. fman's launch in 2017 was a huge success. But despite full-time work, it only makes $500 per month. The goal is to fix this.
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