I really wish someone would start a paid OS based on Linux and OSS tools. I'd happily pay $100/y (year being, new versions/etc) for a stable and awesome UI/UX.
As it is, my Macbook Pro Retina has been crashing a lot and doing weird things frequently since i upgraded to Sierra. Between that and the latest Macbook Pro notebooks, i just don't like Apple anymore. I'm pretty set on buying a highend laptop _(similar build quality to Apple)_ and putting Linux on it... but that's where the fun stops. Linux UIs tend to lag behind significantly.
I want a for-profit UI company working on a Linux UI. OSS just can't compete with Apple on design it seems.. and in my opinion, users shouldn't have to choose between OSS and pretty design.
It's bad enough that if/when i leave OSX, i lose a lot of my apps due to them not supporting (or not supporting competently) Linux, but losing apps and UX.. well, it's a tough pill to swallow.
You just described elementary (fwiw, it is a for-profit LLC).
I think you're massively underestimating the magnitude and difficulty of what you're seeking. elementary has been at this for 5 years and made an immense amount of progress, though. But it's definitely still not at the level of Apple, which has had decades and billions of dollars poured into this.
It's not a "paid OS" in that it doesn't force you to pay a particular dollar amount, though. (People tend to lose their minds when you charge them for open-source software.)
I think this is one big problem with the OSS community: there is no concept of 'value'.
People complain about iOS' race to the bottom, but in the OSS community, I frel like this has been there for a long time. "You want to _charge me for it_ ?! Pffft!"
We may complain about macOS now with Sierra but for thr most part, macOS has been stable for a long time. I haven't seen a kernel panic in probably a decade. Not saying it's perfect, but there's a point you hit when people are paid to make things happen and macOS hit that point yeats ago.
I would argue Elementary provides a lot of value and should therefore weed out the complainers and worst of the bunch by charging. I would remove the 'pay what you want' and just charge $30 or $40.
We don't live in the Star Trek universe yet, so people still need money to live. I fully believe in and support companies, individuals, and groups that provide a good value for what they charge.
I _want_ those people making great things and doing it full time. Otherwise, you just get abandonware or crappy products where people don't fix bugs because they have a day job to deal with. That's the reality in my mind.
Ironically, Elementary might have an easier time charging money for it if they positioned it less as an open source project. macOS is built largely atop open source software, and while they do make the GPL'd sources available for download they're not nearly enough to compile an OS with an experience approaching macOS.
I can throw $XX at a linux distro, pray that it goes to the right things and gets improved proper, and then wait until it becomes good, or I could throw $XX at a closed source solution, and have something that works good right now.
Its all fine to donate $XX, but buying for $XX to get something significantly worse than its competitors is a bit weird, and can only really be justified through "I support free software even if it has binary blobs", which is still a bit weird
I believe elementary OS is the closest thing to what you're looking for. They're an LLC with the team that focuses on building a good looking UI and a nice UX. Pantheon is the only desktop environment which I wouldn't call outdated in the Linux world and somewhat stable and easy to get (Solus project is attempting to do the same, but I think they just don't have enough man power to pull it off).
I wish them the best of luck but recall Eazel (?) attempting to do this with Gnome back in the day and ended up folding as not enough people were willing to pay.
I agree, been using mint linux (Debian based, borrows some "just works" stuff from Ubuntu) plus the Cinnamon Desktop, is a dream, on high end hardware or not. I will concede though, most people coming from iOS/Mac will want something tailored and curated for them, even though *nix offers unlimited possibilities in customization and software.
I'm right there with you. The only thing that keeps me on a Mac is the combination of Unix + Half decent UX. If someone built a paid Unix/Linux distro that could run Mac Apps, I'd give away my extra kidney for it.
Windows almost has me sold with their new Ubuntu subsystem.
I've come to a conclusion that if you have high standards, you can't look to other people for happiness. Even if I had a dream system for a while, at some point they'd follow a new trend that annoyed me and I'd feel left out again. Or they'd fail to follow a trend, and I'd complain that they'd fallen behind.
I've been orphaned from several platforms. OSX surprised me. It appeared to be the dream commodity unix. But then a release broke my workspace usage.
Eventually, I completely switched to a stripped-down unix. I use a bash menu for controlling things like wireless and screen lock. Tmux/dwm are my window managers, I use whatever the latest browser is.
All this required effort to learn and set up. People who look to the big companies for fashion would sneer at this. But it's a sharp tool, and it'll never be made obsolete by shifting trends.
I gave that up in 10 minutes. I really tried spinning up a basic docker project (docker compose) without luck. Sure, having a bash is a step forward and I see it getting better but it's no way near to a developer's basic needs.
It works tolerably well, but the hyper-v thing that it runs on is currently my #1 suspect when Windows takes > 30 seconds to connect to any network :-/
> Is that not what Red Hat is? I thought that's what the Red Hat license provided?
I won't say anything bad about Red Hat, but calling the UX awesome isn't something I would do based on my experience. Then again, they might have changed but I haven't heard anybody mentioning it.
(This used to be Canonicals niche before they picked up the assumption that Mac-like == Good ; )
I may have skipped over the awesome UX. More of the stable and paid dev work.
I'll agree most UX on Linux isn't great. But GUI is such a pain in the ass that most people really don't want to work on it. Plus, plenty of Linux users aren't casual users and will accept or prefer function over form.
I myself am a heavy terminal user and pretty much limit my GUI use to the occasional image editor and the browser.
Fedora is ahead of RedHat server, kernel and package-wise. That's the point: pish the edge with the desktop, keep the server conservative and very stable.
RedHat makes their money on support licensing for the server. Employees are paid to work on Fedora, but it is not the RedHat product.
That's really sad to hear.. if you think the GNOME 3 UI is buggy, childish, opinionated, and hard to customize (I've yet to get a downloaded theme to work right the first time) Fedora is a non-starter.
Which is really too bad. It's the only RPM distro I've seen that's reasonably well put together.
Probably nothing that can't be easily dismissed as personal preference. I recall YaST had a bad habit of unnecessarily cycling network interfaces when certain changes were made, but that was a long while ago.
Awesome UI/UX is where everything falls apart. Everyone wants something different and just about everything beyond a rectangle with a few handy buttons on it actually slows productivity. Nothing's worse than waiting for an animation to complete so you can click a button you have to click 100 more times today. On top of that, people get bored really fast and then everything has to be overhauled for absolutely 0 gain.
I'm a KDE user / occasional contributor. I love the new Breeze theming and all the effort that went into the icon set along with it. I've used Macs in the past, and find the UI garish and much more intuitive, and way less customizable.
It is definitely a case of "to each their own", but the only issue with KDE right now is developer churn. As the writers and more experienced developers in some applications reduce their participation due to time constraints, it is incredibly hard for anyone to step into those shoes in often millions of LOCs code bases. A lot of UI rot isn't because we don't have technologies (Kirigami, Qt Quick Controls 2, Plasmoids, etc) that enable fantastic UI and UX experiences, it is because porting forward hundreds of applications comes down to who has the time and willpower to either continue maintaining their 10 year old project or someone having the willpower to learn what can often be very ugly C++ or ancient PyQt codebases.
I also have no problem with what Gnome is doing. Their applications may not be for me, but I can recognize the beauty in what they are trying to accomplish, and still think they have a much better design language than anything MS / Apple is putting out. Whenever I sit down at OSX / Windows I feel like both are stuck in the 90s, often because half their applications (especially system management) were written then and never updated since, and because they just make random UI splits every release to look shiny and new by just changing the shell look and keeping the rest jarringly legacy.
It's all subjective but I find that KDE apps need a lot of work in terms of control flow, UI hierarchy, white space usage. To me, these are some of the things that macOS and most third party applications for it get very much right, and coming from it KDE feels... jarring. In some ways it feels modern but in others I feel like I'm using Win9x, complete with overcrowded windows and dialog tunnels, with a new coat of paint. It would greatly benefit from someone sitting down and giving it all a rethink.
GNOME sits on the other side of the spectrum on these issues but I personally find it and in fact most GTK+ apps more aesthetically pleasing and more well organized even if all the buttons are too huge and its white space is like a football field.
> I'd happily pay $100/y (year being, new versions/etc) for a stable and awesome UI/UX.
The problem is that many people have differing ideas of what the UI/UX would look like.
If you asked me to provide such a thing I'd just use Debian. Others might prefer RedHat, or similar. But copying an existing distribution, and keeping up to date with new versions would be a full-time job in itself, and that wouldn't leave any room for actual development.
The GNOME project, and KDE project for that matter, have spent years creating a unified environment, and even with their funds and developers the project is never-ending.
I wouldn't say a minimal & unified distribution is impossible, but it would require a lot more users to pay, up-front.
You can always pay for Ubuntu. BTW, that is probably the one closest to what you're describing, not elementary, but they have a tendency to focus in fixing not the broken things.
As a daily Linux user I feel your pain, but have you considered Windows 10 with their Ubuntu coop install? I'm seriously considering it for user-space apps.
>I'd happily pay $100/y (year being, new versions/etc) for a stable and awesome UI/UX.
Good luck with that. The problem is that no one will make a UI/UX that's both awesome and stable. It's not like the resources aren't there: there's a ton of DEs for Linux, and they've been working on them for 20 years now. But the problem is they can't ever agree on anything, and they can't ever just leave well enough alone: every time they get something stable, they abandon it and make up something completely new and unstable. It's easily the 2nd biggest hindrance to Linux-on-the-desktop adoption (the biggest of course being application compatibility/inertia with Windows).
>but that's where the fun stops. Linux UIs tend to lag behind significantly.
That's the Linux community's fault. It's not the features that lag, either; KDE, feature-wise, has always been far ahead of the commercial UIs. For one simple example, I can't middle-click and vertically maximize a window on any other DE that I know of, but in KDE that's been a standard feature for at least 15 years. For another simple example, multiple desktops have been standard on Unix UIs for over 30 years, but never in Windows or Mac. The problem with Linux UIs isn't design, it's stability: everyone's constantly revamping stuff (Gnome3, KDE4, KDE5, etc.) and never spending any time fixing bugs. For instance, I have the Dvorak keyboard set on my LM17.3/KDE desktop, but several KDE apps don't respect that and go back to Qwerty. (To be fair, Windows is even worse: I have my work Win7 desktop set so I can switch between Qwerty and Dvorak, and the stupid thing is constantly switching back and forth randomly.)
Totally agree with this. Except, I've never liked the KDE look and feel. It's like the worst glossy cartoon ui ever. Yuk. To be fair, I haven't looked at it recently, so the gloss might have been toned down or removed.
But to your point of bug fixing, I absolutely agree. macOS is plagued by this as well, but mot to the degree Linux DE's are.
I've used multiple desktops since the 90's and loved it. macOS has had support for a while, but the animation switching from desktop to desktop was horrendous. I got a utility to fix that, but it's a joke they don't just include a checkbox to toggle the animations. This is one huge UX fail in my mind.
KDE's changed its look, but more importantly, it's not set in stone: it's entirely possible to change its settings and theme. It's the most configurable DE out there.
I really wonder sometimes why distros don't use it more, and make their own custom themes for it, instead of just leaving it at the default. It wouldn't take that much work to make themes to make it look almost like anything you want. Or you could even make a different version of Plasma which emulates some other OS/DE if you needed to, leaving all the underpinnings intact.
As it is, my Macbook Pro Retina has been crashing a lot and doing weird things frequently since i upgraded to Sierra. Between that and the latest Macbook Pro notebooks, i just don't like Apple anymore. I'm pretty set on buying a highend laptop _(similar build quality to Apple)_ and putting Linux on it... but that's where the fun stops. Linux UIs tend to lag behind significantly.
I want a for-profit UI company working on a Linux UI. OSS just can't compete with Apple on design it seems.. and in my opinion, users shouldn't have to choose between OSS and pretty design.
It's bad enough that if/when i leave OSX, i lose a lot of my apps due to them not supporting (or not supporting competently) Linux, but losing apps and UX.. well, it's a tough pill to swallow.