Would something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SuSE fit what you're looking for (both are paid, commercial Linux distributions), or am I misunderstanding?
The problem is that if you start giving your money to some group that could be working on the things that are most important to you, but they aren't working in that direction yet, then your support is understood to be a mandate for what they're already doing. Waiting until they're actually doing the things you want them to do before you start sending money their way doesn't work, because the point is to be the thing that incentivizes them to move in the direction you want.
This isn't so subtle that it's impossible to talk about and be understood, and it might work if your case is one that involves you being a patron for an individual or small group (e.g., through Patron). But for large, shambling, Red Hat-sized organizations, the message is one that's nuanced enough that you can pretty much count on it going uncaught.
But even for small groups, there needs to be a way to send the signal "please don't take this to mean that you can't stop doing the exact thing that you're doing now or else you'll disappoint; by all means, experiment on new stuff".
I agree with the patent that a highly polished version of Linux would go a long way toward further adoption.
As someone who has worked as both a sysadmin and software developer for many years, RHEL and SuSE are not any better than the other Linux distros in terms of polish and usability.
RHEL/SuSE are "enterprise" Linux, meaning you pay the vendor for a phone number to call when things don't work according to the documentation.
As primarily server-based operating systems, they receive no extra UI polishing than their free counterparts (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu). I would argue that they often receive even less because as server operating systems, the vendors expect you to run them mostly in a headless environment.
In fact, since they are so "enterprise" and have long support/release cycles, they frequently featured software which is years out of date even on the day of release. Because the software has had several months/years since release, all the obvious show stopping bugs have been quashed, so now it's "ready for enterprise."
I would say that back in the day (mid-2000s), I would probably have considered Mandrake Linux to be the most polished. They had a graphical software center years before Ubuntu did. Unfortunately they found, as many others did over the years, that unless you're #1 or #2 in the desktop Linux distribution list, eventually the money dries up and you're toast.
Not to knock "enterprise Linux" too much. It has it's time and place: when you need a stable operating system with vendor support that you plan to develop and release a product on and expect that product to work for several years without major attention.
But for polished desktop use, they're worse than the other free distributions like Ubuntu/Debian/Arch/Fedora, both because enterprise Linux distributions lack recent software, and because the documentation is frequently behind a pay wall and only produced by the vendor (instead of say the Arch Linux or Gentoo wiki).
I remember RedHat as ugly. It would be closer to elementary.io, but paid. Well, the installation process of elementary.io displays unfriendly information too... At the extreme, choosing Mac OS X requires very few decisions, so I don't want to compare Linux distributions either. One distrib should stand out for my usecase, be clearly differentiated from the rest of the market and be the obvious choice for me. (that's where good marketing proves useful).
I know, it takes 1000 customers at 200€/yr to hire the first developer... Too much, too little.
SO, is your issue with a decent windows manager? I work on RHEL systems daily, and under the hood (sysd arguments not withstanding) its no more or less clunky than any other 'distro' out there. I guess I'm just trying to figure out what exactly you're looking to buy?
Yes it could be summarized as a window manager if it takes over all aspects of managing the computer through a GUI.
I develop with Mac OS and deploy my cloud services on Debian. I don't know much about Linux beyond apt-get upgrade, nginx, Ansible and Java apps. I know when I install Mac OS X that the progress bar is gray with no text on the screen, which means I don't need to dive into the technical details at any point from installation to writing a presentation, displaying it on an external screen through HDMI, tuning a mouse or plugging a printer. Has RHEL improved that much?
On step further is of course being able to install a good clone of Keynote (slideware), iMovie and an image editor for $40-80 each, but that's after the ecosystem starts gathering around the OS.
There is this great UI stack that is open source, has the latest and greatest animations. Its API is even used by thousands of developers already. It's called Android. Maybe it's time to ditch X11 and move to a more modern stack. Problem solved.
Ps: during the transition, you could support both. And of course the touch aspect needs to be cleaned up but it would still be a much better codebase to start from.
Yes I have. The installation process shows a progress bar in an old-school bevel/embossed window, underlined with the filename it's writing. On my computer it showed alerts in the middle. Once started, it's just a normal Linux with sharp edges. Installation of at least one of my programs (probably IntelliJ) crashed, I think I succeeded to fix that using advice from Stack Overflow and the command-line, if I remember. Definitely working, but definitely not the experience we'd like.
It's already a great OS, to be honest, but what about adding 20-100 employees and making it a blockbuster?
