780k Windows Users Downloaded Linux Distro Zorin OS in the Last 5 Weeks

Win11 is mostly written by AI now and it's pretty obvious.

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.

Dave Plummer, retired Microsoft engineer from the early days, made a video on this 2 weeks ago:

> Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60

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

You mean the m3 MacBook Air?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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/

Looks pretty generic to me, in line with modern trends of spaced out, extra padded, pale tones.

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.

May be an age problem. Slackware has a homepage stuck in the 1990s.

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's not weird, but it is wrong. I have used zorin as my daily driver for years now, and it's a great, boring Ubuntu distro. I love it.

thats probably because so many people are downloading a 5~7 GB file.

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/

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.

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.

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...

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.

It looks good, plus they're good at marketing it and the website is very engaging with telling me what problems of mine it solves and how.

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.

Get her on a Mac if you can. I got my mum to switch to Mac from Windows over a decade ago and it’s been fantastic for both of us. Her support needs dropped from once every two months to once every few years, and she’s been able to do more with her computer than she would ever have attempted on Windows. She’s been using knitting software to make patterns to share and learnt how to use photoshop, all by herself. The computer just working and not breaking anytime she tried something was fantastic for her confidence in trying/learning new things.

Probably gonna have to explain this for folks unfamiliar with Charlie Brown.

Isn't Zorin an Irish company?

Who would run Windows on AWS? I know some companies do, but it's like 0.01% of all Windows machines.