Your paid Linux idea won't work, because money is not the only thing holding back the open-source community. Other reasons are:

- Design isn't appreciated or valued. A successful OS effort can't be driven only by engineers.

- An obsession with choice as an end to itself, and being unable to say, "This is what we think the best user experience will be. You can't change it."

- Fragmentation with too many APIs, GUI toolkits, and so on.

- Participants focusing on users like themselves (tinkerers and geeks) rather than typical end-users who want to use the device to get their real work done, rather than messing with the system.

Until you have a plan to address all these, throwing more money at the open-source community won't produce a macOS-quality OS.