from Hacker News

Ask HN: Where are the paid Linux desktop distributions?

by nairboon on 8/16/24, 3:41 PM with 4 comments

Why isn't there any paid linux desktop distribution for personal use? I don't need enterprise stuff like RHEL, Ubuntu Pro or SLE and I don't really want the latest and greatest release of the usual distributions (often with breaking changes). I run something more stable i.e. KDE 5, which only has minor deficiencies for my setup. For obvious reasons I'm not yet switching to KDE 6.

Nonetheless, there are still a handful older bugs and occasional issues introduced through security updates. Which means finding, developing and applying patches myself.

Wouldn't it be cool, if there were some paid distribution, for a reasonable personal yearly subscription fee. Where you simply submit the bug reports & outstanding patches that affect you and that distribution would then slowly, but steadily (depending on popularity) backport fixes or even hire developers to develop fixes.

Does or did something like this exist?

  • by d3Xt3r on 8/16/24, 11:57 PM

    There's Zorin OS Pro: https://zorin.com/os/pro/

    And elementaryOS is kinda-sorta paid (you can pay $0 too): https://elementary.io/

    ArchCraft also has a premium version: https://archcraft.io/premium.html

    Finally, while this is not a proper distro as such, PartedMagic makes for an excellent rescue option: https://partedmagic.com/

  • by phendrenad2 on 8/20/24, 6:35 PM

    The amount of effort to make a distro that's noticeably better than the free distros would be very large, meaning the price would higher than people are willing to pay.

    Windows 11 Home Edition is $140 now, just to add some perspective.

  • by bguebert on 8/16/24, 5:31 PM

    I thought SUSE had a desktop version. They used to sell it at places like walmart back when you'd get linux on cd/dvd media, but its been a long time since I've seen that. There is also stuff like PopOS that comes on System76 computers or PureOS for Purism/Librem computers.