Ask HN: What do you wish someone would build?
A paid Linux.<p>To get stunning UX design, upstream bugfixing and excellent marketing.<p>Let me explain myself. I love the levels of ergonomy and polish of Mac OS X. But it&#x27;s closed-source software. If I use (and pay) Ubuntu, then great patches are sent upstream, which I can use in Debian on my servers and Arduinos. It becomes useful to everyone. With Mac OS X, we&#x27;re not advancing the world. But when I used Ubuntu for work, I was impaired compared to my colleagues. Blame it on a lack of seniority, but a steep learning curve for my OS is the last thing I want at work. So no Ubuntu, no elementary.io, nothing that has rough edges.<p>What allows Apple to hire UX designers and do bugfixing is the revenue. Which in turns gets them a good marketing team, which persuades the world of adopting their software. Linux misses advocates towards B2B, B2C and B2Gov. If we want adoption, we need a stable income, to improve UX patterns, bugfixing and marketing.<p>The FSF says it&#x27;s ok to sell open-source software, but you just can&#x27;t prevent people from redistributing. So it&#x27;s possible to design a system that requires a yearly fee to access the upgrade repositories. Of course hackers will find ways around, publish a torrent, or choose not to upgrade. But the majority of people want a system that &quot;just works&quot; and have money to put down for this service. Businesses, programmer shops, owners of Teslas and iMacs don&#x27;t want to download their OS from an unsecure source: They want the top-of-the-art, official, upgraded releases.<p>My own threshold is €200 per year for my work computer. We pay that much of IntelliJ. The OS is the most important service in our stack, it deserves paid workers. My parents&#x27; threshold would probably be 50€&#x2F;yr.<p>I think OSS volunteers will feel cheated at first sight, but the software should really push changes upstream and show the value in having a much bigger Linux community.<p>NB: For those curious, this comment has 18 points so far (10:43 GMT).