I've been a Windows user since 3.1; and I've even defended Microsoft in the past (particularly when they made unpopular choices, but for technically correct reasons, like UAC or forcing vendors to rewrite their drivers into userland or using a safer driver model).
BUT, I won't defend Windows 11 and Microsoft's general direction. I feel like there has been a slow cultural shift within Microsoft, from a core of fantastic engineers surrounding by marketing/sales, to the org's direction being set by marketing/sales UX be damned.
Plus it feels like a lot of the technical expertise retired out, and left a bunch of engineers scared to touch core systems instead preferring to build on top using Web tech. It means that Windows/Office stopped improving, and have actually both regressed significantly.
I've actually found myself recommending MacOS, particularly the prior generation of Macbook Airs which are absurdly powerful with absurd battery life for a fair price. Combine that with the lack of user hostility, and UX, that MacOS brings relative to Windows 11, and it is hard to ignore.
I think the toughest thing for me has been watching my former coworkers on Windows transform from technology loving builders into depressed cynics. Like these were some of the most brilliant people I knew and now they struggle to get out of bed.
100% agree, I still can't believe how fast windows is deteriorating. With that said, Linux and Debian helped me a lot. I enjoy tech again. With windows I hated 95% of changes, with linux it is the exact opposite. Having some experience since Ubuntu 12.04, it's amazing to see the progress especially of the last 5 years.
> from a core of fantastic engineers surrounding by marketing/sales, to the org's direction being set by marketing/sales UX be damned.
> MacOS
I think macos is on the same path.
Apple refined the MacBook formula to a perfection and the hardware division made the best of it. But outside of the processor, what is the last significant leap forward that involved brilliant engineers that you can think of ?
One could argue that nothing should change, but that's a lot of missed opportunies (I personally wanted a response to the Surface Pro, and figured out it won't come anytime soon) and we also know that's not how it goes. If there's no significant progress there will be change for the sake of change (coughLiquid Glasscough)
Apple created a boot loader that allows the device owner to install and run an unsigned OS like Asahi Linux without degrading the system's security when you run MacOS.
Applying security per partition instead of per device gives users more control, and you no longer have to worry about Microsoft having control of the machine's signing keys.
Secure Enclave is actually a real dedicated innovation and everything Apple built around this secure box. And the real innovation is not even the technology, but being focused over a decade to design all products to work without making a backdoor. That cant have been easy over so many years
A big concern I have for the industry is what happens as people who truly understand how this stuff works age out. Unfortunately we seem to have stopped replacing them.
Part of the issue is that computers today require no deep knowledge to use, unlike first or second generation PCs that genX and millennials grew up with. So you’re not getting as many people with this knowledge.
Just as significant I think is the prevalence of lucrative work higher up the stack. Why learn deep system internals when slinging JS and wiring together APIs pays as much or more.
Everyone is growing up with tablets now and have awful tech skills. The only kids I know who can use a desktop computer are those who game. Where this goes long-term I'm not sure.
Do we get a really simplified OS in the next 10 years that is built for that generation? Who is going to maintain the old stuff?
> Part of the issue is that computers today require no deep knowledge to use, unlike first or second generation PCs that genX and millennials grew up with.
A point that I've often tried to convey among friends and family. No! Todays kids aren't natural tech wizards because they grew into it. All they know is pressing buttons where the UI/UX norms are good enough that you'll figure it out quickly, especially as a kid.
In my early days I'd press commands out of the back of a manual in order to see what my commodore 64 was all about if I didn't load a game. Turned out I was programming basic (at the level you'd expect from a clueless kid, but still)
Later, in the 90's with your family PC, you were bound to learn some stuff just by wanting to play games. Drivers? Filesystem?
Patches? Cracks? OS? Hardware components (you'd not unlikely put it together yourself).
And I think I was born too late for the best of lessons.
Thank God for lucrative work higher up the stack. Maybe programmers will stop being the only scapegoats for rising home prices and the high cost of living.
Right!!! You don't even have to know Morse code to send a message anymore! Don't even get me started on how they don't teach semaphores in school anymore. Kids these days! Next thing you know they won't be writing programs in assembly anymore!! All these kids know how to do is ask the compiler how to do their work for them.
I find both Microsoft and Apple have lost the thread with the desktop operating systems. Microsoft seems intent on trying to kill their market share with adware, slow performance, hardware security requirements, etc. while Apple, has made MacOS an after thought that sometimes gets poorly implemented features from iOS. See liquid glass as the latest example.
For the first time in a long time I tried out Linux again using gnome and was shocked at how refreshingly good it was. I still think Linux has a few too may hurdles for most people, but I think most people would prefer the user experience if they gave it a try.
Going to paste a recent rant of mine about windows ux. The thread sank so i don't think anyone saw it and i don't want to write a new comment discussing things i hate about windows.
>It's worth pointing out what a hideous
cludge lots of Win10 ui is. I remember
some ui expert complaining how
there are half a dozen (maybe more, i
don't remember) completely different
ui interfaces. The most prominent ones of course is that horrible rectangle
thing that's meant to be the start
menu. Windows 11 didn't do a worse
job, that would be almost impossible,
but it's not much better. Then there
was openly breaking functionality and discoverability by having a settings
app as well as the old control panel,
which is an absolute abomination. The
manager app probably looked old
fashioned on Windows xp.
> All of that was ok, because Win10
looks and feels quite nice overall and
was a significant upgrade compared
to 7. Win11 has none of that saving
grace. They needed to fix the many
disasters of Win10, not introduce new ones.
I will add that the single feature i hate the most about Win10 when it dropped the previous useful start menu and adopting the horrible rectangle thing. The main function of it changed from helping you navigate windows to serving up ads for M$ products. No, i'm not interested in Xbox, if i want to buy your office suite i will. Don't show me a non functioning tile to remind me i don't have it.
The start menu is one of the first things I used to fix on a brand-new Win10 install: start removing all those useless/annoying tiles until I have nothing left but a list of programs. (On Win11, the first thing I fix is to move the toolbar back to left-justified instead of centered; then I fix the start menu tiles).
But I do wish graphics designers would learn to leave well enough alone. People don't want their UI to change on them every 5-10 years. They want to learn one UI and stick with it. The Windows 7 UI was just about perfect; if they had kept that UI while changing internals not visible to the user, they would have had far faster adoption of Windows 10. As it is, I know many people who stuck to Windows 7 for as long as possible until the free-upgrade period was about to run out.
EDIT: I'm not saying there weren't things about the Win7 UI that couldn't be improved. The new Terminal app is immensely better than Conhost. IMMENSELY. But that's an incremental change, not a UI replacement.
I fired up my 10yrs old windows 7 PC for the first time in forever and was appalled at how snappy and quick the OS was compared to my same spec win10 PC. As a career primarily-microsoft-shop engineer I'm done with windows for personal use. I'll never forgive the for wasting everyones time with this garbage. Meanwhile I constantly find bugs from before 2002 that are still in windows10. Windows honestly made me slowly hate all computers.
The only piece of technology in my life that does exactly what it's supposed to do are my keyboards where I make the firmware. Everything else is pop up ridden dogshit
I was recently using an ancient Celeron laptop from like 2006 with Windows Vista, a HDD, and something like 256 MB of RAM, and was blown away by how reasonably performant it was compared to my expectations, especially considering it was a budget laptop in its time.
I feel this even in the edutainment system of my car. It’s one year old. Actual 1-2 second delays per key just to type in an address in the map. wtf is wrong with the industry now.
> arly when they made unpopular choices, but for technically correct reasons, like UAC or forcing vendors to rewrite their drivers into userland or using a safer driver model
Also UEFI and TPM requirements. And i don't even use Windows.
Ditto on legacy of Windows use, and really ‘legacy’ is what it boils down to for me - it’s the devil I know, and you’re a fool if you don’t think MacOS is an angel here - or even whatever -nix flavour you prefer.
It’s been my experience that matter what OS you try to pick up, the most likely case is you mutter “why the fuck do people put up with this” and go back to the one you’re used to, because at least you mostly know the tricks and pitfalls and can get it to do what you want.
Excel and Visual Studio, .NET Runtime and C#, Windows 2000 were among the best things for their time. I think there were like 2-3 months in which even internet explorer was the best browser on the market
Currently, I do, but mostly I mean whatever last year's generation of Macbook Air is. Since you get the best bang for your buck that way, and there are some incredible deals on the M3 and will likely be on the M4 when it is replaced.
I have mostly kept to linux and macos since 2008, so I was shocked when I could still find the old XP style control panels in windows when I tried it a little about 2 years ago
The worst part is, there are now two control panels (the other is called "Settings"). Some settings are in both, while others are only in one or the other.
Very sleek marketing, but why did they rebrand (the fantastic) KDE Connect to "Zorin Connect"[1]? From the mere <30 commits, I see no reason for the fork, only confused users.
If it was tightly integrated into the OS I could sort of understand not mentioning its name, like you don't want "Foobar Control Panel" and "FizzBuzz Start Menu". But KDE Connect is a standalone app you can install even on Windows. And this is not just hiding the name, it's replacing it!
So, why the "rebrand"[2]? It feels like an attempt at stealing credit.
Presumably because a good portion of the target audience are less technical users, and there's no reason to be throwing extra (ex-)initialisms at them. "Zorin Connect" is clearly something that will connect my Zorin OS to something. "KDE Connect" is something that might perhaps connect me to a "KDE", but what's a "KDE" anyway and why would I ever need to connect to it?
Forking it makes it easier to convince your flock of sheep that you must pay for GPL software. It also gives them a lot of opportunity to inject their own happy accidents into there.
They have a very slick and professional looking webpage. Is it weird that that makes me wary? I’m used to the best distros having webpages that look like a wiki or a professor’s website.
Zorin OS' main pitch is the design work they put into it to make it look like Windows or macOS. As far as I can tell they wrote zero new software (the taskbar is a forked GNOME extension, and the Zorin Connect app is a forked KDE Connect).
So, its not surprising they made an effort to make a nice looking webpage, design work is basically the only thing they are doing.
Honestly that's one of the thing where Linux is truly behind other os. Design really need someone to step up, gnome choices are really debatable, kde is great but c'mon.. it's not for beginners or people who just want things to work.
I found that Linux mint desktop environment is the best of both world, zorin a bit behind then everything else.
That has not been the case for quite a long time now. Lots of distros still have websites that look like a wiki, see Arch. But in their case the Arch wiki is one of the best wikis ever existed for what it covers.
If you look at modern yet established distros, I struggle to find the outliers that don't have professional looking, slick web pages. See all the *buntus, Fedora, Elementary OS, Cachy OS, Bazzite, Endeavour, Manjaro, Linux Mint, and so forth.
I think the medium is the message here. When I see Arch's home page, I know it will be a hobby OS where there's countless hours of fun in terminal land editing config files. That's how I know it's not for me.
I think a project's web page design conveys a lot about the philosophies of the project itself. My first thought when the page loaded was "Chinese knockoff of Windows 11" - it looks like a product.
Update:
It is a product. To get themes/configurations more palatable to former Windows and Mac users, you need to pay $48
https://zorin.com/os/pro/
If you know what a distro is, and that distro is most trustworthy when the website looks unappealing, chances are you don't need to be convinced of benefits of Linux!
In the past it made more sense to have a shitty webpage because open source projects don't tend to have graphic designers contributing to them, but anyone can AI a decent looking static site these days, so it wouldn't surprise me if some of those open source maintainers start choosing to use them.
It isn't weird. They also don't seem to provide any proper screenshots on the website, or at least I couldn't find them. (By "proper", I mean 1:1 actual pixels, not some photoshopped screen mockup.)
Solaris is dying, Irix last release was in 2006, is nowhere to be seen, all that is left is AIX and HP-UX but their available desktops are the very same you find on Linux and the BSDs
You can so easily vibe code a landing page that these days still having a bad landing page suggests you really don’t care about the details, and that’s a bad sign.
> having a bad landing page suggests you really don’t care about the details, and that’s a bad sign.
That depends upon your definition of a good landing page. Personally, I will pay more attention to a Linux distribution if the landing page has information that is valuable to the community. If it looks like they are trying to sell something, I will just move on. In a way, I treat caring about the details as a bad sign (though I realize that I am just prioritizing a different set of details).
> You can so easily vibe code a landing page that these days still having a bad landing page suggests you really don’t care about the details, and that’s a bad sign.
"Looks like a wiki or a professors web page" is not "bad landing page", it's "aesthetic that is not the mainstream aesthetic". We're not talking about "things don't line up", we're talking about functional.
And frankly, if I see that someone pointedly doesn't vibe-code their landing page, that's a good sign that they're not phoning in the rest of the work, too.
"At least vibe code it, so people know you care about detail"
Do you see the irony there?
If something is a cheap template or just vibe-coded slop, it denotes precisely that someone doesn't care about detail. It's exactly for those style-over-substance people that these tools exist!
That's not to say that a dated, perfunctory, or poor attempt might not suggest a lack of interest in detail itself, or at least a lack of personal insignt for user experience. It could, but vibe coding delivers no cheat around that. It just writes it in big bold letters.
It seems as if Microsoft really put the gun to many people. Many things they don't want in Win11 yet Microsoft does not listen.
Hopefully that will last - Microsoft has caused more than enough damage at this point in time. Quality-wise I feel the new Win-releases are progressively getting worse, less and less caring what users may want.
More than other distros, Zorin markets (and has marketed) itself as Windows-like, which probably elevates it in search rankings and LLM queries for people looking for a distro that more closely mirrors what they’re familiar with.
People really, really want a “Windows, but just the good parts” with as little deviation and required learning as possible in terms of desktop experience. A distro with a DE that nearly perfectly replicates “greatest hits” Windows versions (2K/XP/7/10) would probably be doing serious numbers right now if it existed.
> A distro with a DE that nearly perfectly replicates “greatest hits” Windows versions (2K/XP/7/10) would probably be doing serious numbers right now if it existed.
"Zorin Look Changer" used to "let you select from Windows 7, XP, Vista, Ubuntu Unity, Mac OS X or GNOME 2" themes, whilst newer versions want you to pay nearly $50 for the privilege (although they have significantly reduced their offerings, with their "Windows Classic" theme just being their "Windows-list like" theme with a slightly different start menu).
Probably like MX Linux, which has, for some reason, topped the Distrowatch popularity list for years in front of Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Debian. Strangely enough, CachyOS seems to have adopted the same strategy and it's now first place on that site.
I've been using Linux since 2001, and I honestly I find it funny how these niche flashy distros are popular with the new generations. Probably because newbies follow the screenshots and /r/unixporn posts, instead of caring about support, mind share and governance. Except Arch, because it's both a really good distro and a symbol for cool h4x0r edgelords, so it's where everybody seems to land after playing with the niche distros like Zorin until they inevitably become unsupported.
Rock-solid distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora don't have that "cool" factor so noobs don't even consider them, even though under the hood it's all the same, and on day 2 you just want something that works, rather than something that looks good on a Reddit post.
---
You know Linux has gone mainstream when baby's first distro Zorin has a privacy policy and terms of service page, as it's published by a for-profit company.
Distros like Debian and Ubuntu also suffer from issues with compatibility with newer hardware due to their older kernels. This is part of why distros based on Fedora and Fedora Atomic (such as Nobara and Bazzite, respectively) have seen popularity.
I'm going to have to tap the sign for distrowatch not being a measure of popularity: https://blog.popey.com/2021/01/distrowatch-is-not-a-measure-... A very small number of linux users have ever even heard of distrowatch, much less ever visited it, it's totally irrelevant for anything other than news about distros, which again only a tiny portion of people care about.
But it is amusing when I hear about distros that are "doing numbers" and it's the first I've heard of them. I don't really care about how many downloads, though, what's more interesting is weekly or monthly active users based on unique IP hits to update servers. (Some distros track and publish this.) Recently Bazzite, a distro targeting gamers, hit 31.6k weekly active users, not bad for something only a couple years old. (Over 2 years ago, Ubuntu Desktop was at 6 million monthly active users.)
Smaller distros have more incentive to boost their perceived popularity -- as a Gentoo user I don't really care so much about popularity (and I'm happy to see more Linux adoption in general regardless of distro) but about longevity. But I guess props to Zorin, they've apparently been around as an Ubuntu derivative since 2009 despite this being the first I've heard of them. Yet only two years ago did they get the ability to dist-upgrade, so I wonder wtf they were doing for the prior years: https://blog.zorin.com/2023/07/27/zorin-os-16.3-is-released/
I don't trust Distrowatch's popularity list. I have thought for years it was probably gamed.
There are constantly distros in that top ten list that aren't in other top ten lists like mentions of reddit, mention on Twitter, Google searches for "linux distro", etc.
The distrowatch rankings are based on page views to the distros section on the site. So the distros that lead the rankings tend to be moderately popular distros that link to that page on their site.
The problem is Gnome have really committed themselves to screwing up UI paradigms.
I'd be much less happy with Linux if Cinnamon DE didn't exist because that's essentially a Windows like experience without the BS.
Conversely the default Gnome desktop is awful IMO.
Taskbar, start button and menus all have decades of proven effectiveness, no one needed to mess with them just get the details right (e.g. fonts and interactions).
The marketing of it as "looks and feels like Windows 11!" is probably the biggest hook, if one can assume the majority of the 780k are non-powerusers who are wary about the end of Windows 10's support, and getting pwned on the Internet...
Because usually it works, the out of the box deb + snap + flatpak, polished experience cozy look with some presets to minimice friction, + ubuntu LTS its a nice pack.
I have to do tech support for grandma. Every few years, her Windows laptop gets so slow that we get her a new one. This time I will test out a switch to Linux instead of buying a new computer. Zorin is the most attractive option because it's the least strange.
If people stopped creating weird spinoff distros, which offer zero value except for a preconfigured Desktop, the entire Linux Desktop ecosystem would be in a far better place.
These distros focus on aesthetics choice, but underneath they are always plagued by the same things, tiny maintainer teams completely overwhelmed with the task of managing a distribution. Leading to a great first impression, but an inevitable breakdown in usability.
Every single person would be better served by Kubuntu than Zorin. Simply because Kubuntu has far superior backing behind it.
There are hundreds of these weird distros, targeting different audiences and they are all terrible, because none of them have the actual capabilities of maintaining their distro.
A distro working out-of-the-box for a certain user group is not a weird spinoff. Some people love to economize time; a distro that takes care of exactly that is a good deal.
None of these distros economize time. This is not Debian/Arch/Ubuntu with some preconfiguration. Every single user of these distros is in the hands of a tiny number of developers who mostly work on this as a hobby. Things are going to break and they will break in ways nobody will know why, since the base distro does not have these problems.
There is a very good reason why the Arch forums do want reports from arch derivatives, because they are all inevitably broken by their tiny maintainer teams.
I think Kubuntu looks very reasonable and switching KDE themes is as simple as it gets.
Where I think you are right is that it would be very feasible to create a few different builds of e.g. Kubuntu which come with different presets or make those available during installation, with easy switching in the life desktop environment. Maintaining each one should be quite simple, as it is just a few packages, with some configuration on top.
Exactly, you do that by installing Debian with KDE. Not by creating a new distro, which you do not have the resources to properly maintain, which is then perpetually broken in weird ways, which no user can figure out since the base distribution does not have the problems the completely understaffed maintainers introduced.
What all of these distros want to be is a basic configuration script. What they are is a nightmare for every user, since the user is now in the hands of a few people, who as a hobby are maintaining his OS and occasionally will break it.
It is so bizarre that so many people want to make distros, when they are completely unequipped up do so.
How else will you ship your desktop to less-technical end users? Convince Canonical to include it in Ubuntu by default? Every time you create a customized version of Linux that people can install out of the box, you are by definition creating a distribution.
The pro version comes with "Professional-grade creative suite", but they don't tell you what you're actually getting. It's just opaque corporate-speak one-liners "Make real progress toward your goals".
Readit News
BUT, I won't defend Windows 11 and Microsoft's general direction. I feel like there has been a slow cultural shift within Microsoft, from a core of fantastic engineers surrounding by marketing/sales, to the org's direction being set by marketing/sales UX be damned.
Plus it feels like a lot of the technical expertise retired out, and left a bunch of engineers scared to touch core systems instead preferring to build on top using Web tech. It means that Windows/Office stopped improving, and have actually both regressed significantly.
I've actually found myself recommending MacOS, particularly the prior generation of Macbook Airs which are absurdly powerful with absurd battery life for a fair price. Combine that with the lack of user hostility, and UX, that MacOS brings relative to Windows 11, and it is hard to ignore.
People I’ve known with deteriorating health lost their interest in tech beyond familiar point A to point B.
> MacOS
I think macos is on the same path.
Apple refined the MacBook formula to a perfection and the hardware division made the best of it. But outside of the processor, what is the last significant leap forward that involved brilliant engineers that you can think of ?
One could argue that nothing should change, but that's a lot of missed opportunies (I personally wanted a response to the Surface Pro, and figured out it won't come anytime soon) and we also know that's not how it goes. If there's no significant progress there will be change for the sake of change (coughLiquid Glasscough)
Applying security per partition instead of per device gives users more control, and you no longer have to worry about Microsoft having control of the machine's signing keys.
Part of the issue is that computers today require no deep knowledge to use, unlike first or second generation PCs that genX and millennials grew up with. So you’re not getting as many people with this knowledge.
Just as significant I think is the prevalence of lucrative work higher up the stack. Why learn deep system internals when slinging JS and wiring together APIs pays as much or more.
Do we get a really simplified OS in the next 10 years that is built for that generation? Who is going to maintain the old stuff?
A point that I've often tried to convey among friends and family. No! Todays kids aren't natural tech wizards because they grew into it. All they know is pressing buttons where the UI/UX norms are good enough that you'll figure it out quickly, especially as a kid.
In my early days I'd press commands out of the back of a manual in order to see what my commodore 64 was all about if I didn't load a game. Turned out I was programming basic (at the level you'd expect from a clueless kid, but still) Later, in the 90's with your family PC, you were bound to learn some stuff just by wanting to play games. Drivers? Filesystem? Patches? Cracks? OS? Hardware components (you'd not unlikely put it together yourself).
And I think I was born too late for the best of lessons.
> Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60
For the first time in a long time I tried out Linux again using gnome and was shocked at how refreshingly good it was. I still think Linux has a few too may hurdles for most people, but I think most people would prefer the user experience if they gave it a try.
>It's worth pointing out what a hideous cludge lots of Win10 ui is. I remember some ui expert complaining how there are half a dozen (maybe more, i don't remember) completely different ui interfaces. The most prominent ones of course is that horrible rectangle thing that's meant to be the start menu. Windows 11 didn't do a worse job, that would be almost impossible, but it's not much better. Then there was openly breaking functionality and discoverability by having a settings app as well as the old control panel, which is an absolute abomination. The manager app probably looked old fashioned on Windows xp.
> All of that was ok, because Win10 looks and feels quite nice overall and was a significant upgrade compared to 7. Win11 has none of that saving grace. They needed to fix the many disasters of Win10, not introduce new ones.
I will add that the single feature i hate the most about Win10 when it dropped the previous useful start menu and adopting the horrible rectangle thing. The main function of it changed from helping you navigate windows to serving up ads for M$ products. No, i'm not interested in Xbox, if i want to buy your office suite i will. Don't show me a non functioning tile to remind me i don't have it.
But I do wish graphics designers would learn to leave well enough alone. People don't want their UI to change on them every 5-10 years. They want to learn one UI and stick with it. The Windows 7 UI was just about perfect; if they had kept that UI while changing internals not visible to the user, they would have had far faster adoption of Windows 10. As it is, I know many people who stuck to Windows 7 for as long as possible until the free-upgrade period was about to run out.
EDIT: I'm not saying there weren't things about the Win7 UI that couldn't be improved. The new Terminal app is immensely better than Conhost. IMMENSELY. But that's an incremental change, not a UI replacement.
The only piece of technology in my life that does exactly what it's supposed to do are my keyboards where I make the firmware. Everything else is pop up ridden dogshit
Also UEFI and TPM requirements. And i don't even use Windows.
It’s been my experience that matter what OS you try to pick up, the most likely case is you mutter “why the fuck do people put up with this” and go back to the one you’re used to, because at least you mostly know the tricks and pitfalls and can get it to do what you want.
If it was tightly integrated into the OS I could sort of understand not mentioning its name, like you don't want "Foobar Control Panel" and "FizzBuzz Start Menu". But KDE Connect is a standalone app you can install even on Windows. And this is not just hiding the name, it's replacing it!
So, why the "rebrand"[2]? It feels like an attempt at stealing credit.
[1] https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-connect-android and https://github.com/ZorinOS/gnome-shell-extension-zorin-conne...
[2] https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-connect-android/issues/19
but forking not to confuse users does make sense
It's a really scummy move by the Zorin people to take FOSS, rename it, and sell access to it.
If it quacks like a duck...
Deleted Comment
So, its not surprising they made an effort to make a nice looking webpage, design work is basically the only thing they are doing.
I found that Linux mint desktop environment is the best of both world, zorin a bit behind then everything else.
If you look at modern yet established distros, I struggle to find the outliers that don't have professional looking, slick web pages. See all the *buntus, Fedora, Elementary OS, Cachy OS, Bazzite, Endeavour, Manjaro, Linux Mint, and so forth.
Update: It is a product. To get themes/configurations more palatable to former Windows and Mac users, you need to pay $48 https://zorin.com/os/pro/
What it does well compared to websites of the same bunch is that it has good contrast for text. Not the obnoxious light gray on white.
At this point Linux is stable and works and is reliable. It just usually looks jankey.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the zorin desktop experience reminded me of a professional OS.
Solaris is dying, Irix last release was in 2006, is nowhere to be seen, all that is left is AIX and HP-UX but their available desktops are the very same you find on Linux and the BSDs
It’s a brochure website.
That depends upon your definition of a good landing page. Personally, I will pay more attention to a Linux distribution if the landing page has information that is valuable to the community. If it looks like they are trying to sell something, I will just move on. In a way, I treat caring about the details as a bad sign (though I realize that I am just prioritizing a different set of details).
I'd argue many older and more simplistic landing pages look way better than their current equivalents.
"Looks like a wiki or a professors web page" is not "bad landing page", it's "aesthetic that is not the mainstream aesthetic". We're not talking about "things don't line up", we're talking about functional.
And frankly, if I see that someone pointedly doesn't vibe-code their landing page, that's a good sign that they're not phoning in the rest of the work, too.
Do you see the irony there?
If something is a cheap template or just vibe-coded slop, it denotes precisely that someone doesn't care about detail. It's exactly for those style-over-substance people that these tools exist!
That's not to say that a dated, perfunctory, or poor attempt might not suggest a lack of interest in detail itself, or at least a lack of personal insignt for user experience. It could, but vibe coding delivers no cheat around that. It just writes it in big bold letters.
Hopefully that will last - Microsoft has caused more than enough damage at this point in time. Quality-wise I feel the new Win-releases are progressively getting worse, less and less caring what users may want.
I wonder how much of a bump other distros have seen in the same period.
People really, really want a “Windows, but just the good parts” with as little deviation and required learning as possible in terms of desktop experience. A distro with a DE that nearly perfectly replicates “greatest hits” Windows versions (2K/XP/7/10) would probably be doing serious numbers right now if it existed.
Funnily enough Zorin used to offer this.
http://web.archive.org/web/2012fw_/zorin-os.com
"Zorin Look Changer" used to "let you select from Windows 7, XP, Vista, Ubuntu Unity, Mac OS X or GNOME 2" themes, whilst newer versions want you to pay nearly $50 for the privilege (although they have significantly reduced their offerings, with their "Windows Classic" theme just being their "Windows-list like" theme with a slightly different start menu).
Hopefully it goes better for them than it went for Lindows. Though at least the name isn't lawsuit bait.
I've been using Linux since 2001, and I honestly I find it funny how these niche flashy distros are popular with the new generations. Probably because newbies follow the screenshots and /r/unixporn posts, instead of caring about support, mind share and governance. Except Arch, because it's both a really good distro and a symbol for cool h4x0r edgelords, so it's where everybody seems to land after playing with the niche distros like Zorin until they inevitably become unsupported.
Rock-solid distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora don't have that "cool" factor so noobs don't even consider them, even though under the hood it's all the same, and on day 2 you just want something that works, rather than something that looks good on a Reddit post.
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You know Linux has gone mainstream when baby's first distro Zorin has a privacy policy and terms of service page, as it's published by a for-profit company.
As though Red Hat and Ubuntu weren't a thing for literal decades.
But it is amusing when I hear about distros that are "doing numbers" and it's the first I've heard of them. I don't really care about how many downloads, though, what's more interesting is weekly or monthly active users based on unique IP hits to update servers. (Some distros track and publish this.) Recently Bazzite, a distro targeting gamers, hit 31.6k weekly active users, not bad for something only a couple years old. (Over 2 years ago, Ubuntu Desktop was at 6 million monthly active users.)
Smaller distros have more incentive to boost their perceived popularity -- as a Gentoo user I don't really care so much about popularity (and I'm happy to see more Linux adoption in general regardless of distro) but about longevity. But I guess props to Zorin, they've apparently been around as an Ubuntu derivative since 2009 despite this being the first I've heard of them. Yet only two years ago did they get the ability to dist-upgrade, so I wonder wtf they were doing for the prior years: https://blog.zorin.com/2023/07/27/zorin-os-16.3-is-released/
Isn't Ubuntu the first thing a "noob" thinks of when they hear the word "Linux"?
There are constantly distros in that top ten list that aren't in other top ten lists like mentions of reddit, mention on Twitter, Google searches for "linux distro", etc.
I'd be much less happy with Linux if Cinnamon DE didn't exist because that's essentially a Windows like experience without the BS.
Conversely the default Gnome desktop is awful IMO.
Taskbar, start button and menus all have decades of proven effectiveness, no one needed to mess with them just get the details right (e.g. fonts and interactions).
The new features render millions of windows machines unable to run the new version leaving them ripe for for an upgrade to Linux.
per https://zorin.com/os/
https://blog.zorin.com/2025/11/18/test-the-upgrade-from-zori...
a mirror site[s] or a reputable torrent, would likely be helpful.
try these:
https://zorin.com/os/download/18/core/
https://zorin.com/os/download/18/education/
These distros focus on aesthetics choice, but underneath they are always plagued by the same things, tiny maintainer teams completely overwhelmed with the task of managing a distribution. Leading to a great first impression, but an inevitable breakdown in usability.
Every single person would be better served by Kubuntu than Zorin. Simply because Kubuntu has far superior backing behind it.
There are hundreds of these weird distros, targeting different audiences and they are all terrible, because none of them have the actual capabilities of maintaining their distro.
There is a very good reason why the Arch forums do want reports from arch derivatives, because they are all inevitably broken by their tiny maintainer teams.
("nice looking" by the standards of the vast majority of people, not some small group of hackers to whom Windows 95 was the pinnacle of design.)
Where I think you are right is that it would be very feasible to create a few different builds of e.g. Kubuntu which come with different presets or make those available during installation, with easy switching in the life desktop environment. Maintaining each one should be quite simple, as it is just a few packages, with some configuration on top.
What all of these distros want to be is a basic configuration script. What they are is a nightmare for every user, since the user is now in the hands of a few people, who as a hobby are maintaining his OS and occasionally will break it.
It is so bizarre that so many people want to make distros, when they are completely unequipped up do so.
This pretty much describes LMDE[1].
[1] https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
That may be the goal for you personally but it certainly isn't the greater goal of Linux as a whole.
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