I used to love playing breakout, solitaire, and the other games included in the old black and white iPods.

Extremely innovative design with great features.

Fantastic, I did the same thing at work. Donating a little to the FOSS projects we used is a pittance compared to overall development costs.

Sadly many projects don’t take donations or aren’t able to provide a proper receipt for a donation.

It’s easiest to convince corporate payment, if it’s called professional or enterprise subscription or something like that.

Mario Kart Series

Horizon Chase Turbo is also lit. High speed and rocking soundtrack.

Mountain Duck and Cryptomator

Maybe donate 50 cents for every hour you used the software and it was useful to you.

That would be 1000 €$ per year if you work with Linux full time.

Let’s see some commercial software:

Microsoft Office 365 is 70 $€ per year. Adobe Suite around 700 $€ per year. IntelliJ IDEA about 170 $€ per year. Affinity Suite is 170 $€ once. Reaper is 60 €$ for a discounted license. Full featured media player like Elmedia costs 20 $€. BBEdit costs 60.

The FOSS windows and Mac FTP client Cyberduck asks for a minimum 10 €$ donation. It won’t prompt you for a donation if you bought a license. The Duck applications are all pretty nice.

You can use Zoom without an account, just a link. Signal requires a smart phone and number to sign up. Zoom also supports far bigger groups for video than Signal. Not an alternative really.

You are right, I remember something about Linux users paying more than Windows users and Apple users paying the most for HumbleBundle. The number of small paid applications is low compared to macOS.

Corporations and governments are already paying Red Hat or similar companies for their services and development. Their use cases aren’t the same as the average desktop users though. Linux makes for a great thin client for web applications for example. That’s very far from Audio and video workstation applications.

your main issue is that you just have some strong software preferences

Yes, I want to use applications and do something productive with them. An operating system shouldn’t be an end in itself.

I avoid browser based software because the UX is always a bit icky. It does fill lots of niches for special software you are right.

I have often found that if I can pay for the software it will be better

Yes, developers need to eat, pay rent, etc. Culturally Linux users don’t like paying for software. That in turn leads to the indie developer scene you see on macOS for example to be very small.

Even donating to FOSS projects I use can be a hassle. And of course I can’t feasibly donate to the developers of all the packages on a Linux distribution. It would be cool to pay a monthly subscription, that’s then distributed among the software I use or have installed. That could be integrated into a package manager even. I don’t know if any Linux distro does something like it.

Sure. Many computer users have some specialized software they need. It’s not about only professional software either.

My phone records video in 4K HDR. Editing and viewing that on Linux is a pain to not possible last time I checked. Or software to do my taxes is absent. There’s also nothing on Linux that’s close to Apple’s GarageBand, which I use once in a while for fun to make music. If Netflix is now available in more than 720p, I haven’t checked. For vector illustration Inkscape is just no fun to use compared to Affinity Designer. For Software Development I haven’t seen a nicer git client than Git Tower. Screen recording was also painful last time I tried it.

I have tried Linux on the desktop from time to over the years. The weak point were always the applications. Often they are inferior to those available on macOS or windows. Support is practically nonexistent. Packages in the repository might be years old. So far I haven’t found a Linux desktop application that actually got me excited. Something or other also seems to be broken every time I try using it for longer. A ton of work on distributions seems to go into yet another desktop environment instead of actually useful applications. Upgrading between releases of the same distribution is often painful or even not supported at all.

I’m glad that Linux exists and it can be very useful for sure, but it barely meets my use cases and just isn’t a joy to use overall. My main use case for Linux on the desktop is to explore Linux. For an operating system and software available free of charge, it’s truly impressive though.

Try editing HDR photos.

Even for BSD, there’s an incentive to share your code to upstream. Otherwise you will have to maintain a separate branch or fork and that can take a lot of effort.

Especially RMS

People don’t want to use operating systems, they want to use applications to solve their problems. Linux has always been bad at software distribution for commercial applications. It all starts with dependency hell, no real standards, a million different packs systems and so on. It simply makes Linux a pain in the butt to develop desktop applications for. Much of the user base is also very hostile towards anything not FOSS and free of charge. Desktop Linux is also fractured into different WMs and DEs, adding more pain. You really don’t want to provide commercial support for that.