It's kind of late but I've written a blog post on this. It's in Russian but you can use Google Translate
Well, here from the future.
It's still not done. And they do have a Mac version.
Their disregard for open source software showed up in the latest ransomware attack. As it seems thy are still using outdated MS servers and databases, while the rest of the world uses linux-based cloud solutions. Including Microsoft (!)
I got it to work on Ubuntu 20.04 with playonlinux:
This astonished me too. Which company runs their entire network on Windows... I thought nowadays 99% of all servers run on Linux.
Some of Garmin’s developer tools run on Linux, but otherwise they completely neglect a growing user group.
Come on @garmin_developers, port your apps to mainstream Linux distributions already.
Running Garmin apps in a VM or via Wine isn’t nice for your customers.
They don't even need that.
Just pack it in a docker image and be done... no idea what the heck they are thinking about.
Just like with the ransomware attack, seems that the dudes rely on pretty darn old windows based IT infrastructure and they devel team mustn't be too great. Sure, good hardware but the rest sucks big time.
Just like the Connect IQ SDK, the language seems brilliant but there is barely any documentation and the private developers are not encouraged to share their software, which is utterly frustrating for beginners like me.
Anyway, posting in this forum is an exercise in futility and I don't think anybody from Garmin ever reads it... but at least you can blow some steam.
BTW, you could try Wine, though it seems to have an issue as Garmin Express is 32 bit software and last time I tried it threw an exception.
Hey from the future:
None of the reasons provided does actually make any sense. The different versions of Linux are totally irrelevant, there is more difference between Widows XP, Windows 10 and Win7 than among any Linux distro.
People do NOT modify Linux, they put their stuff in their home directory like everywhere else.
All-in-One packages for Linux do exist, the same compiling process does package them for any distro you want, PLUS: There is DOCKER and other containers. They existed already back then.