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.
> 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.
So UEFI is both less secure and less flexible.
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.
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.
> Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer
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.
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
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.
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.
(by the way the laptop was a Framework 13 AMD, curious if others experienced the same. Maybe they fixed it now)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also UEFI and TPM requirements. And i don't even use 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/verbing-nouns/6838872....
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.
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"
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.
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.
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/
As though Red Hat and Ubuntu weren't a thing for literal decades.
Isn't Ubuntu the first thing a "noob" thinks of when they hear the word "Linux"?
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.
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).
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.
The new features render millions of windows machines unable to run the new version leaving them ripe for for an upgrade to Linux.
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]
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 :)
> 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.
So I’d go with Ubuntu.
Seriously though, a per-country breakdown would've been very interesting to see.
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....
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.
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.
Good skills. It will probably manage to Secure Boot and run, say, ESET (handy for audit points in the enterprise world).
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.
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 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.