[Enginerrrd]

Not illogical at all. It gives you information about the creators and is atypical for open source folks to commercialize in user-hostile ways. It's like a moral version of code smell.

The examples aren't very good analogies.

[lockhouse]

So how are they supposed to commercialize given that most Linux users are generally a bunch of cheapskates?

Donations seldom amount to enough to pay for hosting costs and supporting the developers and their families.

Nobody buys physical discs anymore.

Selling swag can have some limited success if you can come up with a really cool design, mascot, and/or logo

A few companies have had success selling hardware, but that's a pretty small market overall with quite a bit of competition already.

Subscriptions generally only work if you're providing commercial support contracts.

Valve and JetBrains are the only companies I can think of that are making any significant amount of money selling closed source software to Linux users.

I'm not surprised at all that they are using ads to monetize their distro, as it's one of the few ways they can.

[KronisLV]

> Valve and JetBrains are the only companies I can think of that are making any significant amount of money selling closed source software to Linux users.

Honestly, JetBrains have some of the better IDEs out there, that have all of the features I need, pretty good code completion and suggestions, some of the best refactoring out there, good debugging capabilities and framework integrations as well as language specific functionality (e.g. dependency management integration). Well worth the money. Even Fleet, their text editor alternative to VSC will probably be mature enough to be a serious contender in a few years, though not yet.

Another piece of software that I pay for is GitKraken, a really nice Git client with a GUI, which makes switching between different accounts a breeze (for example, different GitHub accounts, each with a separate SSH key) and makes using Git actually pleasant with all of the visual features. It feels like a more polished SourceTree or a more featureful Git Cola and makes me feel like you don't need to use the CLI all the time anymore.

On Windows, there's maybe MobaXTerm, perhaps one of the best SSH clients with things like multi-exec, support for a variety of protocols and other quality of life features that mRemoteNG and other options don't quite have. Pretty good.

> So how are they supposed to commercialize given that most Linux users are generally a bunch of cheapskates?

Other than that, most of the software I use is free and good enough (the cheapskate argument, I guess): everything from LibreOffice, to things like GIMP, OBS, Audacity and Kdenlive. I guess what I'm saying is that if you make a really good product that doesn't have alternatives that are close enough in your niche, then you can indeed do decently selling it.

As for how that would look for a distro, I'm not sure, given how many other mature ones are out there. Maybe selling support, though obviously that is hard to do.