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.<p>Nonetheless, there are still a handful older bugs and occasional issues introduced through security updates. Which means finding, developing and applying patches myself.<p>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.<p>Does or did something like this exist?
There's Zorin OS Pro: <a href="https://zorin.com/os/pro/" rel="nofollow">https://zorin.com/os/pro/</a><p>And elementaryOS is kinda-sorta paid (you can pay $0 too): <a href="https://elementary.io/" rel="nofollow">https://elementary.io/</a><p>ArchCraft also has a premium version: <a href="https://archcraft.io/premium.html" rel="nofollow">https://archcraft.io/premium.html</a><p>Finally, while this is not a proper distro as such, PartedMagic makes for an excellent rescue option: <a href="https://partedmagic.com/" rel="nofollow">https://partedmagic.com/</a>
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.<p>Windows 11 Home Edition is $140 now, just to add some perspective.
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.