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Ask HN: Would you pay for Linux?

2 points by VierScar ↗ HN
I've been tossing up the idea of a modern, developer-friendly distro with a nice UI, simple file hierarchy and good package management. Linux is built around being open, and almost all distro's are free (as in beer), so this might be an unusual thing to ask, but..

Would you pay for a Linux distro?

If so, what would you want to see in that distro? If not, why not?

7 comments

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mfenniak
I think it'd be a hard sell. You'd need to find some real, concrete pain points that people suffer from, and then address them, and then market it towards people suffering from those issues.

I'm a desktop Linux user (Mint), and I find it to be quite developer-friendly, and it has a nice UI, and Debian has the best package management. So, personally, I'm not sold yet. :-)

VierScar
Thanks :) I know I'll be burned for this but, my thought was to make it more Mac OSX-like. With a similar File Hierarchy (the Unix one seems over-complicated for its use).

A nice UI (similar to Unity), a for-profit app store, and drop support for 32-bit, and every other platform, except 64-bit and ARM, I hate so much backwards-compatibility like being able to run DOS on Windows 8 - I mean really?

I had a bunch of other ideas too, but these are all mainly behind-the-scenes work, no "concrete pain points" unfortunately I think.

Ynot_82
I don't think many people would pay for Free software (especially if you're targeting this toward developers)

But many would pay for services.

- First class 24/7 phone support.

- Pre-configured vertical software stacks (Eg. out the box VoIP server, or whatever)

- Option of off-site hosting.

VierScar
I should have clarified, sorry - I intended on making it a developer-friendly desktop distro.

Also could you explain off-site hosting?

Ynot_82
> Also could you explain off-site hosting?

Customers who don't want the hassle of having their own hardware.

You provide the hardware (in a datacentre) and rent out usage.

dagw
I wouldn't pay for a Linux distro in isolation, but I would pay for a Linux distro guaranteed to work 100% out of the box on my laptop, backed up with support.
Morphling
As Linux currently is answer would be: No! There are a lot things that are extremely wonky on Linux and few things that works extremely well, but for me positives don't out weight negatives on a desktop thou.

Would I ever pay for Linux distro? Quite possibly, but only if the software capabilities on the platform catches up with the competitors, for one I like playing games on my PC and as it currently stands I get sever performance losses and tons of graphical glitches which is a driver problem and as such not so much a distribution problem.

As for now I will continue running Linux on my laptop and servers, but my desktop will stay Windows for the foreseeable future.