plain TeX is a joy to use, but you must really understand boxes and glue etc on a deep level. LaTeX makes that easier, but at the cost of extreme complexity internally (compare the output routines for example.)
Getting paid in money is one motivation for people, but not the only one. Some people do things because they want to, regardless of payment. And some of them want to give what they made as a gift to anyone. The flip side is that no one can force them to do anything, it's all voluntary.
I'm not good enough to give recommendations, but meanwhile some questions might make it easier. What is your budget? Is open source important to you? What's the biggest thing you want to print? Are there any special features you're looking for? Do you want to tinker with it or rather have it "just work"?
The author of JSLint wrote:
"So I added one more line to my license, was that, "the Software shall
be used for Good, not Evil." And thought: I've done my job!
/.../
Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a
different lawyer, at a company. I don't want to embarrass the company by
saying their name, so I'll just say their initials, "IBM," saying that
they want to use something that I wrote, 'cause I put this on everything
I write now. They want to use something that I wrote and something that
they wrote and they're pretty sure they weren't gonna use it for evil,
but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So, could I give
them a special license for that?
So, of course!
So I wrote back---this happened literally two weeks ago---I said, "I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil." "
There are some old interviews with George RR Martin where people ask him about various characters, and GRRM would adjust his pronounciation to match the person asking the question. So he's pronouncing names differently in different interviews depending on how others pronounce them. I wonder if it is to make the other person comfortable, or if he just doesn't have a canon pronounciation.
A good story about a bad day doesn't have to be about complaining. It can be about learning from mistakes, a strange irony, the absurdity of coinciding factors, etc.
If you don't want to touch anything, you could boot from a live USB image and try it?
I wonder how much work would be needed to make a "FreeDesktop Linux" complete OS, with the runtime + whatever it needs beyond that. Then when you install a flatpak, it's just like installing, uh, I didn't think this through tbh.
PC-DOS on an IBM 5150 (iirc).
Maybe Debian with a wm? I like cwm, but there are many to choose from. You can add pretty much any cool feature on top.
Which features are you looking for beyond what can be done on Debian?
The founder of GNOME, Miguel de Icaza, stopped using Linux in favor of macOS in 2014 iirc. That makes me guess that the macOS design was at least acceptable to him. Maybe the visions were similar enough.