1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18
blog.zorin.com
blog.zorin.com
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.
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.
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.
We learned all that, but that knowledge is all but worthless and has been for some time. I wish I had learned programming instead. All these other computing and OS skills become unnecessary as time moves on. Except for VPS hosting with FTP.
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?
Also UEFI and TPM requirements. And i don't even use Windows.
Overall imo the biggest issue with windows is that it almost never replaces things, it adds layers on top and becomes slowly this convoluted mess.
The biggest annoyance for me were the basic tools like MMC snap ins, regedit, ... have not been touched in years. They need a major overhaul at this point. If you change something in cloud defender, intune - you won't even see that change in those tools anywhere.
Instead 365 cloud admin sites have been redesigned every year only to cause confusion if you don't open them every day. Also MS Graph? Some simple scripts turned into a mess (not sure if that changed).
1) Microsoft needs to remove some of the old stuff but also new stuff that makes it more difficult to understand for sysadmins. Nobody needs 5 ways of configuring GPOs like Intune has it (+ Azure policies). There should be a single way only for everything in the GUI/web + understandable API/cmdlets.
2) Templates and defaults - Secure setup within the products should be the default, why do I need to create 200+ GPO policies onprem to have at least 75% of CIS covered? Same with MS365, some policies have just reckless defaults. I'd much rather set up 20 policies for each machine specifically to disable things I don't need rather than this. On the other hand - allow me to disable whatever I want (even those security updates), if I shoot myself in the foot, that's my problem. And if I need something quickly, why don't config templates for the entire OS exist? If I have a webserver - give me a list of things I should set up in one place. If I have a db, if I want to disable spyware stuff - same thing.
I don't want or need a copilot in exchange or every admin portal, I want to have everything on couple clicks and as fast as possible.
People I’ve known with deteriorating health lost their interest in tech beyond familiar point A to point B.
Not developing it.
> Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer
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
While we're down this rabbit hole, my favorite bit was wrapping up the versions of windows: CE, ME, and NT: Windows CEMENT.
There are certainly features in later versions I wouldn't want to live without, but the decay began when he was moved to other products.
It almost instantly won me over with the leap in stability due to the NT kernel, but the craziest thing was this feature called "Hibernate". This was the time when booting was painfully slow, and here was a feature that not just booted rapidly, but dropped me into the previous session with all apps open! It was pure magic. I switched over to Linux exclusively a few years after that, but this was the feature that prolonged that decision for a long time. I don't think Linux ever got a useable hibernate, but the feature became not as necessary due to the advent of SSDs.
They blew it all up with Longhorn/Metro, and have been doubling-down on denial ever since.
Apple fixed it by switching to their own processors. MacOS is sliding fast too though. If I leave my MacBook plugged in overnight, it’s toasty in the morning at least half the time.
Not sure how many times it died because it was low at night and I forgot to plug it in, and how many were failed sleeps.
Power Nap or whatever it’s called is disabled.
(by the way the laptop was a Framework 13 AMD, curious if others experienced the same. Maybe they fixed it now)
I haven't checked if the Framework 13 got BIOS updates at the same time. But you could check if the keyboard is causing the wakeup (the Framework 13 has the same keyboard as the 16, but its smaller screen means less flexing in a backpack so it might not be suffering the same issue) by opening a Notepad window before putting the computer to sleep and closing the lid. If you find that random characters have been typed into Notepad while it's sleeping, then the issue was the same that the 16 was experiencing: the keyboard needs to be disabled while the lid is closed. If you don't see random typing with the lid closed, then it's a different issue.
FYI: Over time, this repeated pressure + rubbing (especially with dust or grit in between) can leave permanent key-shaped marks or “ghosts” on the screen. Thin laptops and bags that are tightly packed or bulging make this a lot more likely, since there’s less rigidity and more pressure on the lid.
Until one day when I unpacked it and found that it was both hot and already running, and decided that this had to end.
I found that there was a process that was part of a printer driver which existed only to spam notifications about buying printer supplies, and that some fucking sadist at HP absolutely buried into Windows as a task that would wake the computer to do this even if it was unplugged.
Because that's what I need in my life: A laptop that wakes up to check the supplies on a printer that I don't even own.
(Thanks, HP.)
It was fast, stable enough to work for months or years without crashing, secure, didn't need frequent re-installs, didn't need constant cleaning / defragmenting, didn't have (too many) anti-features nobody wanted or used, it just did what you wanted it to do.
It definitely helped that it existed in an era of app monetization through targeted advertising, as opposed to monetization through bloatware, start page hijacking and completely unnecessary toolbars.
8 was when things started going sideways. 10 was not bad, but it already started the "Microsoft knows better" trend, with automatic updates you couldn't turn off and files you couldn't touch, even as administrator. 11 is what it is.
Likewise with SharePoint compared to file shares and NTFS permissions
>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.
Just so that you don't accuse me of looking through rose tinted lenses, i think xp looks horrible. Admittedly design has moved on, but i don't remember ever loving it.
A close second in my book was the PlayStation 3 User Interface. Gloriously intuitive. PlayStation 4 and the new XBox are god awful. I can't wait to buy a Steam Machine and never have to search for my freaking game again like on the XBox monstrosity that has all kinds of crapware on it. Is frustrating your users good for business?
Windows 8 and the Ubuntu of around that time both had absolutely bonkers interfaces. Is it better for a phone? Sure....but I'm not using a phone. Windows 8 was so bad I honestly can't believe it wasn't blocked by upper management. It made all the previous customer/user knowledge worthless. I literally had to memorize all these Window Key + letter commands just to shut down the computer and find the My Documents.
> 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)
A secure subsystem sounds pretty familiar to me, we've had that since the early NFC days, and that powered mobile offline payment (NFC) since two decades now.
If macos was bringing it to new heights with incredible applications I'd see the significance of it, but securing login using a TPM is also done by the competition. Apple pushed it farther, but not that much farther as to make it special IMHO.
I mean, even in iOS, I see the point in hardening the system, but that's not just the Secure Enclave, and on the other side of the coin we get nothing else that wasn't there before.
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.
So UEFI is both less secure and less flexible.
I moved on, as other makers are pushing the enveloppe, but feel it's a shame Apple couldn't keep pushing during the Tim Cook area. Also having no good commercial alternative to Microsoft sucks, and that's where we're heading.
I was thinking about the OS layer. My understanding is that hardware makers want to discharge responsibility of the OS on other entities, and ideally wouldn't even want to write drivers if they could avoid it. Having a partner you can enter a contract to provide an OS and maintain it for however long is needed is IMHO a huge deal they don't get with linux.
That's why Framework is the only maker coming up with remotely innovative ideas and also supporting linux. I love them for that, but as the other side of the coin they are extremely limited in the business side, they won't even ship to most of SEA for instance.
Apple plowing forward at least brings some competition, we've seen that on the ARM side. And looking at Microsoft(!) and other makers plowing forward on the form factors, I'd wish Apple had followed.
I'll mention what I personally think they should do in sheer innovation, which has the potential to have a larger impact than their A and M chips: A device with an e-paper display. E-Ink is almost there for black and white. Maybe Apple is the only company who can pull it off? That would be an enormous difference and benefit for consumers, who could better use their devices outdoors and in well-lit environments instead of gloomy offices.
On what I care the most, and as a goal Apple set for themselves, Apple still couldn't make the iPad Pro a general use computer. Microsoft is 10 year ahead of them in that regard, even Samsung's Chromebooks end up being more powerful for a "Pro".
Apple couldn't overcome their gaming aversion, and the Vision Pro is such an unattractive product in no small parts because it's at the crossing of that and the iPad "what is a computer" syndrome. I waited for its launch before renewing my headset, and honestly regretted the wait.
Valve came up last week with a set of devices that genuinely looks fresh and opens new doors. Lenovo keeps pushing the boundaries of what a mobile computer looks like, with actually interesting screen/keyboard combinations I'd buy in a heartbeat if I was still commuting. Asus keeps showing the world what a real "Pro" tablet looks like.
Innovation is happening in spades, while Apple still hasn't fulfilled its own promises.
> e-ink display
Chinese makers are already on that beat, and that's where we saw the first e-ink smartphones. Computer wise, I'd expect Lenovo to hit the mark first. Now I get that many here won't touch a laptop with Windows on it, but Linux support is also getting decently good.
Apple is ahead in every aspect which matters for consumers. Touchpad, speakers, battery, performance, operating system, display. And those are incredibly important aspects. Not gigabytes of RAM and such things which people here care about. If another manufacturer made a device which would be as good as Apple on any of those points, people would be singing their praise for years.
If any operating system was released which was half as good for general computing (not administering servers and programming), then likewise. It would be considered incredible.
As for gaming, I'll give you that one. It's not Apple's strong point. Never was. Just like enterprise office suites.
> Chinese makers are already on that beat, and that's where we saw the first e-ink smartphones. Computer wise, I'd expect Lenovo to hit the mark first. Now I get that many here won't touch a laptop with Windows on it, but Linux support is also getting decently good.
Yeah, and they are not consumer ready. The display tech is almost there, but the devices mostly suck because manufacturers seem to not be able to understand how to deliver quality in their products. I expect Apple to be the only company to be able to do that, just like with so many other technologies where others were first.
> If another manufacturer made a device which would be as good as Apple on any of those points, people would be singing their praise for years.
If Apple was really hitting perfectly all the important aspects, they would have 90% market share on the PC market. For the record they're at about 15%.
On the bias coming from sticking around nerd circles, yes "normal" customers don't long for shoving 128Gb of RAM in their space heater PC. But they're also not raving about how good the trackpad is, or how the display is such a technical marvel.
You'll see people walking from meeting to meeting with their mouse because they just don't use trackpads (though they might touch their screen if/when it's supported), others spending their days with earbuds in ear because it dual connections to the laptop audio and they never hear the speakers in the whole device's life. Some dock their macbook all day and hook it to a FHD monitor. Everyone will care about different things.
That's the part for me where the Apple laptop line is so uniform, you need to fall pretty near the middle of the target to properly get the benefits.
> Apple is ahead
They are ahead regarding the exact balance they are targeting. But you'll get better perfs if you're willing to go full desktop for instance and don't care about the size and power consumption (the mac pro going the way of the DoDo doesn't help). You'll get more/cheaper memory if you don't care about a unified architecture. Apple's GPU isn't the market leader. You also won't get anything smaller or lighter than the macbook Air. And of course no USB-A on laptops, which surprisingly still stings.
It's obvious but merits to be said: Apple targets a very specific consumer, and won't be optimal for everyone, including people who want more than what Apple offers.
> manufacturers seem to not be able to understand how to deliver quality in their products.
This is more a matter of taster I'd argue, what people see as "quality" will vary. I'm still amazed by people praising the glass backs and metal on the iPhones for instance. An eink laptop will probably be the same deal, going the pragmatic way (mostly plastic/composite) or the Apple way (glass and aluminium)
Then some things are up to individual preference and needs. But nobody prefers having a bad touchpad, for example. As for market share, that doesn't say too much about innovation, nor quality. The cheapest beer is always going to sell more than any other beer.
Keeping USB-A or cheaper RAM per dollar aren't innovations in my book. Neither is keeping a computer plugged in. We've had plugged in computers since the beginning, but it's only in recent years that they became truly portable.
> But they're also not raving about how good the trackpad is, or how the display is such a technical marvel.
Everybody I've seen who've tried a MacBook have been ecstatic about the display and the touchpad.
I really wish that other manufacturers made good products to compete with Apple on other aspects than price. And they do, in limited niches. And they also innovate, but they never make good implementations. A plastic e-ink laptop with a next-gen e-ink display would be fantastic. But you just know that the manufacturer is going to make the computer horrible in every other way. Unfortunately.
Greatest non-Apple innovations I can think of on the top of my head: E-Ink, 120hz displays, under-display fingerprint reader, AI/LLM (which is massive), wireless laser mouse. And everything related to gaming/gpu. But nobody is complaining about nVidia not innovating, like everybody is complaining about Apple.
I don't like Apple's touchpad because it's too big and makes their keyboard worse. I much prefer laptops with smaller touchpad. I usually disable it anyway so most of the time it's wasted space for me which makes my main input device worse.
I think this difference in perception is really the crux of it. My TL;DR would be that Apple really pushed the enveloppe for decades, until it mostly stopped doing so (the M chips are the last real advancement for me)
To go point by point:
> touchapds
Apple introducing decent touchpads was an innovation, it happened in 2006. From there they refined the formula, became the absolute best at making touchpads, and decided to leap to button-less touchpads in 2018. That was 7 years ago.
> retina
It was a huge leap in display management and technology. It happened in 2015, 10 years ago.
> all-day battery
The 2010 macbook pro touted 10h of battery life. https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/macbook-pro-u...
Current macbook evolved a lot from there, but given how Apple also touted "all day battery life" for the first watches, that milestone was in reach 15 years ago.
--- > [other manufacturers] do, in limited niches. And they also innovate, but they never make good implementations.
Apple's niche is also limited. It grew bigger than in the platinum macbook days, but even today I'd consider it a small part of the global market. DELL or Lenovo would be an example of an actual mainstream PC maker. Jobs would spit on their designs, but if we look at the numbers that's what a non niche maker looks like.
On whether an implementation is good or not is on the eye of the beholder, I think we can agree to disagree.
Their hardware is very good, but it's not as far ahead as you think. Intel makes SOC very comparable to M series in terms of compute and power efficiency. They're rare, but they exist.
And MacOS as an operating system is slipping in many ways to open source competitors. The UI is stagnant in a lot of ways, and actively regressing in others, while open source competitors truck forward. Mind you, the same is true for Windows and to a much larger degree, but still.
Battery life is not subjective. Same for performance, same for display quality, same for speaker quality. I deliberately tried to focus on non-subjective aspects in my original post. If you say that Intel has chips to compete with Apple on a laptop, I believe you. But I haven't heard of any such laptop until now.
As for the operating system, MacOS is getting worse. A lot worse with Tahoe. But it is still the only tolerable operating system if you're working within a GUI. For programmers and sys admins who live in the terminal, this doesn't matter. Neither for people who only stay inside one application (Excel). But if you want to have applications and the operating system working together cohesively in a graphical user interface, MacOS is still about 20 years ahead of competition.
Not to mention sleep/hibernate mode, which is part of the OS, and probably the single most important feature of any portable computing device.
I fully agree on all hardware points: battery, speakers, displays. Sleep/hibernate is a big one as well. It's surprising seeing Windows dropping the ball on this one as well.
There are also things MacOS does way worse than Linux. For example Finder is pathetic.
So yes, it's a weak point in MacOS. But the discussion isn't whether Apple devices have weak points, it's whether they are innovating or not. And even if they're not perfect, they are still way ahead of the competition, IMO.
You're implying that Linux file managers are much ahead of Finder, what are the innovations they have? One innovation I still miss in Finder is z-snake menus for navigating, moving and copying files:
https://discuss.haiku-os.org/uploads/default/original/2X/f/f...
On the other hand Finder does have Miller columns, which to me is the best way to manage and explore files.
So they just wrote something worse with less features in React.
Peak web development.
That said, it's insanely ridiculous that it's taken 10 years to get it even halfway done.
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.
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.
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
Stealing credit was the definitive factor for me, I wanted to try it recently for replacing Windows for some folks, but now I think I’d just go with immutable Fedora.
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...
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/verbing-nouns/6838872....
It’s a brochure website.
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.
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).
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.
Two things that come to mind are: hard to use on a small device, and maybe no good quickstart info (like a bad readme).
The point of polishing these details isn't to indicate how much you labored away at the details but rather that the utility to the end-user was important enough to you to lift your finger.
Whether you spend 10 hours making it mobile friendly, contract it out to someone, or ask an LLM to do it isn't the important part.
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/
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
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.
To me, and of course this is personal, Debian website looks pretty professional in an enterprise-y kind of way. I quite like it.
But then again, it's one example. Hell, even OpenSUSE's website looks super slick and modern.
It’s the root example, of which many of the examples of your list are derived from. Debian is the daddy.
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.
I think the people who have the hardest time are those who think they know what they’re doing so feel they need to change things.
I’ve never seen a beginner at anything start digging through settings wildly, and experienced people know what they want to change. It’s that middle ground.
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.
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).
I say this as someone getting annoyed daily by KDE inconsistencies over decades.
I bought an older version of Zorin, probably 15 or 16, to review for a blog, and I was totally impressed with the consistency of the theming.
To each their own, but Zorin is a cheap on-ramp for people coming from older Windows/Mac and looking for a somewhat apples-to-apples experience of Windows or Mac, with actual updates and not a bunch of ads or telemetry.
Not everyone is a Linux power user
Good theming is great to have, but what’s more important is that the user’s prior experience and muscle memory still applies, e.g. the task manager can be summoned in the same ways, settings panels are structured similarly (and aren’t either overflowing or too stripped down like KDE and GNOME, respectively), key shortcuts are the same with no caveats, etc.
Hopefully it goes better for them than it went for Lindows. Though at least the name isn't lawsuit bait.
https://jargondb.org/glossary/microsloth-windows
would probably be even better bait, due to the perjorative, and 2 trademarks being adulterated
what was it? "go make a cup of tea this may take awhile"
The new features render millions of windows machines unable to run the new version leaving them ripe for for an upgrade to Linux.
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.
From my perspective a solid OS that stays out of my way most of the time outweighs the slight disadvantage of working with older software versions. YMMV.
I'm still wishing very hard for a serious and battle-tested Arch-based atomic distro, so I can chuck Fedora and its RPM packaging model into the flaming sun.
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).
If they cared so much, they would have keyboard shortcut for everything, in every app, with the top bar displaying menu and every shortcut attributed to it, just like macos.
Instead you can use the keyboard to switch an app, close it and so on but once you are working inside, you immediately need to take your mouse. What's the point ? It saves 1 second and confuse lot of beginners.
Menus are one of the primary ways you can discover keyboard shortcuts.
Isn't Ubuntu the first thing a "noob" thinks of when they hear the word "Linux"?
As though Red Hat and Ubuntu weren't a thing for literal decades.
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.
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/
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:
they are large files, and move slow. its been the better part of a day and its almost finished downloading for me.
3.5, and 7.5 GB respectively.
https://zorin.com/os/download/18/core/ [3.5GB ISO]
https://zorin.com/os/download/18/education/ [7.5GB ISO]
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.
That may be the goal for you personally but it certainly isn't the greater goal of Linux as a whole.
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.
Given the fact said distro is based on Ubuntu LTS there is very little to maintain except a set of themes and desktop customisation and default choices. The long support cycle makes it that the Zorin team is not facing major changes so often as they keep the same Gnome version for a long time. This is a perfectly decent sokution for people who do not feel the need to stay current with the latest version of any given desktop at all time.
The answer is the same.
This pretty much describes LMDE[1].
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.
Well yes it is. Zorin is literally based on Ubuntu LTS and their packages are binary compatible.
("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.
That said her requirements are _so_ simple that Debian with Chromium would probably satisfy 100% of her requirements which are ‘download documents from gmail and print them’.
Ubuntu if it’s just an os replacement. She doesn’t know or care what debian or chromium is.
Seriously though, a per-country breakdown would've been very interesting to see.
The former just keeps me going with Ubuntu, but forces to still dual-boot Windows for some creative software I use that Ubuntu lacks (a certain DAW and a CAD modeller). The latter gives me an awesome (or so it seems) OS that is much closer in spirit to Ubuntu than to Windows and supports everything I need, but leaves me vendor-locked to whatever user-hostile directions Apple might take in the future.
I'd like to ask people who had been using both Ubuntu and MacOS, what would you advise? And MacOS users in particular, are you happy with the direction it has been evolving, and with that of Apple itself?
Hope I helped a little :)
Another example is microphone support on M2 series that's not there yet.
Many issues with Asahi are also that there is an incompatibility in page sizes (16k on MX vs 4k on most CPUs), and combined with the usage of ARM, software compatibility is an actual problem if you want to use VMs, DAW software (nothing will work there except Reaper ...) (Maybe this paragraph was a bit ranty, but I'm actually very glad we got Asahi in the first place. It's my daily driver and I'm relatively happy with it)
TL;DR: no hard blocker but there is a people "problem"
So I’d go with Ubuntu.
> I'd like to ask people who had been using both Ubuntu and MacOS, what would you advise? And MacOS users in particular, are you happy with the direction it has been evolving, and with that of Apple itself?
that being said, personally i am not so happy with apple's direction either, which is sliding (much much more slowly than windows) in the direction of buggy software updates, worse overall ux and more and more marketing driven changes...
i really like ubuntu and kde (kubuntu) and i feel like at some point the ux polish of it and the "de-polishing" of macos at some point will converge where i'd just install linux alongside macos and not miss much (but there are lots of reverse engineering issues remaining)...
so my idea is to stay on macos for while more while figuring out how to plug holes (such as smoother iphone integration) and getting more accustomed to kde/linux/ununtu before fully jumping ship...
idk if that is super helpful, but its where im at now in my thinking.
They are grifters.
The simple fact is that they release open source software, much of which is licensed as GPL. They modify these programs from time to time to be compatible with ZorinOS, etc.
They refuse to release any of their sources sometimes, and when they do, they put takedowns and ban people from their community because they believe their paid-for ISOs are closed-source - which is not true.
If you think I'm wrong, mistaken, lying, etc. grab any ZorinOS ISO and go put it on a ZorinOS community website, such as Reddit and sit back and watch.
It's worth mentioning I find all of the ZorinOS downloads using DHT scan. I haven't touched them in a while, but I still find the entire situation perplexing. I have to imagine part of this issue is that the Chinese community is newer to FOSS and doesn't understand these longstanding ideas.
EDIT: Either way, my main point is that Zorin is responsible for how they redistribute the source code and other modifications to the software they sell. They refuse to do that sometimes, and they gaslight their community / the open source community.
I never used it and had to look it up, but this post reminds of it. I think they might've charged for it also.
Here's a review thread from 2002 slashdot... https://linux.slashdot.org/story/02/03/18/1916248/lycoris-de....
Good skills. It will probably manage to Secure Boot and run, say, ESET (handy for audit points in the enterprise world).
I know right. Absolute travesty. Come on grandpa, why aren't you programming?
Thanks to their cooperation, the Year of the Linux Desktop really has finally arrived.