After what seemed like an eternity, the popular free download manager has finally made a version for Linux! The development team finally came around after refusing to release a Linux version for years!It all began in mid 2016 when the developers posted a poll asking what features did the users want to have in FDM, a version for Linux was on of the features suggested.
The Linux community help
I reached out to a very popular Linux blog: Itsfoss, and posted a guest post talking about FDM and asking for the help of the Linux community to change the voting results. The support was overwhelming and Linux is the first featured voted by a margin. You can view the results of the poll from here.
A support issue
Over the years FDM was no longer open source, it turned into a freeware with the old branch 3.9.x remaining open source. So the source wasn’t going to be posted where people could collaborate on it.
Also I’ve received information from the developers saying that it would have to be written from scratch in order to support Linux properly.
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| A screenshot of FDM running natively on Linux |
FDM 6.1 supports Linux!
At last the long wait is over! A version of FDM finally supports Linux! This “Alpha” was released in October of 2018, and the stable version is yet to be released. It’s a huge step from being a promise, a concept and an option on a poll..
You can download this version for Linux Ubuntu from this link.
It’s still in the very early stages of release and missing a lot of features as stated on the download page, with more functionality expected later this year; including features from the 3.9.x series of FDM.
Also Ubuntu is the only distribution of Linux currently supported and any other distros that support .deb files.
Final words
It’s wonderful seeing that something I’ve worked hard towards achieving is finally paying off. I’ve been rallying and pressuring the support team for over 3 years now for a Linux version.
My happiness will be complete when a stable version of FDM 6.1 is released and Linux is one of the supported systems.
Do you use FDM? How do you feel about a Linux version of FDM after all these years? Please let me know in the comments section blow.