I assume it's due to marketing, but it really irks me that I have to scroll down to the bottom and click "View technical details about Zorin OS" to find out that this is a Linux distro build on top of Ubuntu...
It's in the homepage, in the blue and green parts near the middle (Reliable | Secure). But still, they have the place for windows and macos in the tagline, they could add linux.
In old newsprint there was a term "below the fold" with a literal meaning. If it's below the fold it's less important than what is "above the fold" since no one reads below the fold.
Is it burying the lede to point out that it's Linux (or GNU/Linux+Ubuntu extra packages how ever we want to pronounce it)? I would guess probably not.
On a 32" monitor in portrait mode I did have to scroll quite a bit to see those bits. It was worse on my phone, and was even worse on a landscape monitor. "It's Linux" is far less important than what Forbes has to say about it, and it being Linux is more important than it being privacy respecting (which probably means Firefox as the default browser) to the page authors, but who am I to question them. Maybe this is the year of the Linux desktop.
I believe, given their target audience, it doesn’t matter. The information is available for those who care, but for the non-technical user who is fed up with their current OS, the message is: “Feel at home on ZorinOS and experience a performance and security boost.”
They understand that technically-oriented people will research the OS and its underlying components, but their target audience isn’t technical. Therefore, bombarding them with overly technical details on the home page is counterproductive.
In my opinion, ZorinOS has effectively marketed itself.
They will if they are sick of ads showing up in Windows or they heard there more tech focused friend talking about the benefits and decided to do some research.
I hope this succeeds where others have, well, not failed, but not had overwhelming success. Years ago I installed Linux Mint on a family member's computer but they got frustrated enough with it (and required my regular intervention enough) that we ended up switching away. Zorin boasting about you being able to play "an enormous library of your favorite games" or boasting about the vast software library feels like asking for trouble. It won't be long before users run into rough edges.
TBH in the current environment I still think the best OS for "revive an old computer for a not very tech savvy person" is ChromeOS. I've never tried the open source alternatives for that but I'd be much happier setting up a relative with a glorified browser as an OS than something that attempts to do everything.
The advantage of Zorin is that it comes with some level of Wine integration. If it detects that there's a Linux version of a Windows installer, it'll guide the user towards the Linux version instead, but opening .EXEs works quite well out of the box as well.
Getting a recent version of Wine on anything but Arch-based distros without some kind of confusing intermediary is quite tricky, so making Wine somewhat usable goes a long way for non-tech-savvy users.
I've seen Zorin on computers sold for cheap in several second-hand stores. All PCs that have no hope of running Windows 11 (and probably struggled to run Windows 10 before getting a RAM+SSD upgrade). For reusing old tech, it's not a bad solution, though some users might have someone install Windows 10 later anyway.
>One game i have didn't run even run when i was on windows, but the windows version worked in Linux..
Was it an old game? Those tend to do that
>My anecdotal experience with the steam and steamOS has been that the windows versions of games run better via proton than their native linux versions.
This is very interesting, does anyone have insights into why? I can only guess the games/their engines are more mindful of optimizing their calls to the native windows APIs, which when translated turns out to be pretty efficient on the output side too
There's a joke that "the most stable Linux ABI is Win32". Like sibling commenters have pointed out, many Linux game ports either used system libraries that may or may not be compatible after years of changes, or bring along vendored libraries that may not play well. Valve tried to encourage Linux builds for games during their first foray into Linux gaming with the Steam Runtime, but even they have largely abandoned updating it in lieu of advancing WINE and sibling systems like DXVK, vkd3d-proton, dgvoodoo2, et al. Much more engineering effort goes into the Windows game tech stack than native Linux ones have.
For older games, the biggest advantage WINE has over Windows is WINE's prefix model, which lets you essentially build purpose built environments, not dissimilar to vendoring your dependencies into an OCI container. And if you're running a file system with CoW powers, those separate environments don't even take up a great deal of storage since the vast majority of the prefix is bit for bit identical.
Depends, I've still got some of the end-90's Loki game ports. Those were 'real' Linux binaries but won't run on modern Linux distributions due to changes in core libraries.
The big game engines (Unreal, Unity) and even smaller ones (Gamemaker, Godot, AGS) offer Linux runtime support.
> My anecdotal experience with the steam and steamOS has been that the windows versions of games run better via proton than their native linux versions.
I've experienced the same thing with game console emulators. The Windows version run smoother on Linux than natively compiled ones do.
My cousin got my grandmother moved to Linux Mint with some actual success. All she did was check her email and browse the internet, and Linux can do that perfectly competently.
Same story here. Purchased a System76 machine for my ex-wife's grandmother. She "enjoyed learning about the new system". As a bonus she is now completely support scam immune, one of the advantages of the year of the Linux desktop not having happened yet.
Not going to lie, I feel a System76 machine is way overkill for someones grandmother who likely doesn't really need that kind of horsepower... Especially given the cheapest model they sell is 1400.
Windows is like 80? For the average user the average cost of supporting windows is basically 80.
You can get windows laptops for $100–$500 just get one of those and put Linux on it? Not a single person's grandmother (except maybe that one that plays Skyrim) needs a $1400 laptop, total waste of resources.
My kid has an excellent Thinkpad I picked up for something like $500. Runs linux (NixOS, specifically) perfectly well. Even the fingerprint reader works! And if he spills something on it, replacing it is substantially less awful.
Yep, pre-owned Thinkpad is going to be your best option, slap a decent Linux distribution on it and that thing will run for years and years. No need to spend thousands on a laptop that will be used by a kid or an elderly person.
There's a big difference between noobs on their own and noobs with a competent relative.
Way back in the day, I set up my grandpa with Slackware and FVWM. Yeah, I had to edit a configuration file to add a program - but that also meant that once I set it up, it would never break.
> Zorin boasting about you being able to play "an enormous library of your favorite games" or boasting about the vast software library feels like asking for trouble. It won't be long before users run into rough edges.
Proton isn't Wine. The version of Wine that Zorin ships won't run games quite so well.
Installing Steam and running games through Steam will fix that, but it won't help with users downloading the Epic Game Store or GOG or the Rockstar Launcher.
Having helped a few users get acclimated with Linux, I've found that there are always a few rough edges around games. Zorin seems to hide them very well out of the box, though, much better than any of the other distros I've tried.
Proton _is_ Wine. Fixes in Proton get upstreamed into Wine, and Valve hires developers to work on Proton, Wine, and Mesa. Wine isn't in the dark ages anymore and is able to run the majority of things you throw at it confidently and capably.
> but it won't help with users downloading the Epic Game Store or GOG or the Rockstar Launcher.
That's... why we have Lutris? You literally cannot shake a stick without coming across those. Even just typing "epic games on linux" into google and being a dumbass that reads the AI overview, it will tell you that Heroic and Lutris exist: https://i.imgur.com/KBiw1cR.png
After that, you just click some buttons that are clearly marked and wait for things to install, and it just works: https://i.imgur.com/XUFJaUu.png
To be clear, I literally just did this because I wanted to try Fall Guys on my laptop with an aggressively underpowered graphics card. It took only minimal intervention from me (clicking "install" and "next", and then logging in to Epic).
It's not as seamless as hitting "Install" on Steam would be, but if you're able to mod games on Windows (i.e. "follow instructions") you're more than able to deal with the state of gaming on Linux in the present day, and in many ways it is somewhat easier than Windows with the way Linux handles software upgrades.
Ok yes, Proton is a distribution of Wine, incorporating fixes that then get upstreamed, and some other software that users typically want to pull down.
If you open up `winetricks` in a default installation, you can just select to install all of these extra components yourself -- including DXVK (Not that I'm suggesting that someone who is green-eared does that without a guide, but it is literally just clicking checkboxes and then "OK"), and Lutris is another kind of Wine distribution that manages your games and pulls down these extra libraries for you. Most people either add stuff as non-steam games (which handily keeps track of all of the games for you too), which lets you run it via Proton, or just uses Lutris (or Heroic I guess).
But like, even the default distribution of Wine is able to handle things very, very capably now and a lot of things that required tinkering JustWork(tm). I say that as someone who ran a single Arch Linux distribution for 7 years straight back in the mid-late 2010s
I find protondb misleading because GTA V is supposedly "Gold" except Online does not work at all because of anti-cheat. Same goes for many other popular multiplayer games.
I mean, while it technically supports Linux, it’s all in a VM just like normal Chrome OS. It’s not any better for technical work than chrome is in that sense.
I'm surprised to hear that about Linux Mint. I installed it on an ancient laptop for my octogenarian mother and she could get around in it just fine after I explained to her how to use their 'store' to install apps. The interface is quite intuitive, I felt.
My guess is if you are comfortable on Windows then Mint is perfect and works how you expect, if you come from macOS then perhaps Elementary would be better for you.
Zorin negates this worry entirely and allows you to install one OS for everyone and then just choose the Windows or Mac mode depending on the end-user.
Something that I believe is dragging down “mass audience” sorts of distros like Zorin is that they’re only Windows-like in a vague sense, leaving them in an “uncanny valley” of sorts. One of these distros really needs to commit to the bit of Windows-like-ness so it’s a seamless drop-in to the greatest degree possible.
I don't know, when I installed a linux distro with xfce on her laptop after he hdd died it took my partner months to realize she wasn't using windows.
I mean she only figured out libreoffice was installed instead of the pirated copy of office she used to run and complained the menus were different. Little she knew that a more recent version of Office would too have different menus/items placement anyway.
This probably depends on the user. Someone leaning less technical might not catch on or care, but someone who’s even just technical enough to be able to get themselves in trouble probably will. The more technical one becomes, the more tuned into the details of their OS and the more likely it is for those details to become incorporated into their workflow. When those details change it’s then hard to miss.
So there’s some number of users who could probably just be switched over by PC vendors preinstalling Linux, but there’s other groups who’d benefit from something more truly Windows-like.
Aside from those groups, I think there’s a crowd that could be attracted by simply selling your distro as being like “Windows when it was still good, except this time you get to keep it forever”. I think there’s a decent number of people who’ve become fatigued with modern Windows but don’t care enough to switch who’d be pushed over the edge by a distro that’s a near perfect reproduction of XP, 7, etc. Nostalgia can be a powerful motivator.
Heh, I know people who are using a Windows PC for decades yet legitimately don't know what "Windows" is. They have a PC. They work in Word. They browse in Chrome. They have no knowledge whatsoever as to what Windows is.
How long ago was this? There hasn't been a "more recent version of Office" for quite some time, so I suspect that this happened a while ago. Things have changed a lot, let me count the ways...
The rise of smartphones has eliminated an entire class of computer users. People who just want to do some Google searches, chat on Facebook, etc. can just use phones, and they do. (Caveat: I think a lot of people in the 30-50 age group still prefer a PC, because that's what they're used to, but that cohort is a one-off and is slowly diminishing. Furthermore, I've observed that as people near retirement, they are less interested in sitting in front of a computer screen, which will diminish this cohort relatively soon).
So who still uses a computer? I think it's just PC gamers, highschool/college students, and white-collar professionals.
PC gamers are very satisfied with the state of Linux, because games are relatively simple applications, and the Linux ecosystem has been able to provide a great compatibility environment for Windows games.
Students and professionals are less likely to be satisfied with Linux, and it's not really Linux's fault, but a lot of software just doesn't work on Linux. And even if it did, small issues like case-sensitive filesystems could easily provide enough friction to prevent these users from switching. Lastly, these users are willing to spend a modest amount of money to save them time, and a Windows PC with the cost of the OS bundled isn't exactly expensive. Windows 10 was released over 10 years ago, and these users are likely to buy a new PC within that time, meaning they'll always get the latest Windows version, so upgrading their OS isn't really something they think about.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying any of this is good or correct or moral or non-cringe, I'm just saying that this is the real reason why Linux adoption is a more complex issue these days.
> How long ago was this? There hasn't been a "more recent version of Office" for quite some time, so I suspect that this happened a while ago. Things have changed a lot, let me count the ways...
2 years ago but her computer had been installed at least 6 or 7 years before, that was Office 2016 period I believe. Granted the ribbon already existed but the default placements of a number of elements were slightly different than what you see in Office 365 today.
My point is that she didn't really care or realize it wasn't windows until she asked me for MS Office and I told her I couldn't install it on this Linux OS and that I didn't have any license for it. I think the respect the license part was what surprised her the most as a person who grew up in the digital age and got used to pasting random images found on the internet in social medias.
There is genuine value in having it all set up out of the box, and not having to figure it out yourself.
I have been using Linux since the '90s and haven't used anything else in at least a decade, but I struggled to understand what all the pieces were and what I was supposed to do with them when I wanted to play a Steam game with my kid several months ago. I'm still not sure I did it right; I think I probably did install Lutris, maybe, but I have no idea what problem it is meant to solve.
OOC, what were the frustrations about? I jumped ship as soon as Ubuntu started shipping with Unity. For me, as a moderate power-user, it's been pretty smooth sailing so far.
As someone that nowadays lives mostly on Windows, and uses Linux since kernel 1.0.9 days, Unity DE was so much better experience than GNOME will ever be again.
After Unity got removed from Ubuntu as default DE, I eventually adopted XFCE.
On windows you have to apply "a few tweaks" just to get the start bar to stop showing advertising and work as it should. Windows users in the modern day have to do way more tweaks than Linux users do just to get a functional and unobtrusive operating system.
Things got a bit deep into the discussion there for a minute so I'm lifting it out
> Your lengthy response is a good example of Linux forums, that eventually I got tired to visit, though.
It takes four times as much writing to refute bullshit as it does to write it.
My system works out of the box with basically no Tweaking other than clicking "install" on a bunch of things in the software installer.
Meanwhile Windows complaints that I have seen in the last few months from people in communities I am in:
"Is there any way to get windows to stop updating applications at random times? I have bad internet so if I'm trying to play games it lags me out in the middle of a match all the time"
"On Windows it seems like every app has a background task when I boot up that lets it do what it wants regardless of if I want it to"
"(misc comments about Windows 11 blocking Google Chrome)"
"I love Taskbar Tweaker but it errors on startup saying it can't load libraries and doesn't support windows 11, and won't work, and then I click ok and it works"
"Why is destiny 2 not using my GPU? I had to manually go through and select it to use my GPU lol"
"I want to play sims 2 but it doesn't work under windows 11 and I don't want to install a bunch of modding tools to get it to work, but VMWare/Virtualbox doesn't work because you can't do hardware acceleration without disabling a bunch of Windows bullshit" (The Sims 2 works out of the box on Wine and is rated Platinum on ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/app/3314070 )
"It is possible to keep the non-ai subscription to Office 365, but they hide it (link to article explaining how to tweak Windows)"
From what I've seen, Windows users tweak that shit just to get it to work normally, way more than I have ever had to touch my OS. Many of these things JustWork on Linux or are not problems.
> I would like to see someone using Kali Linux for a DAW, without issues, it is any of them, after all.
Why would you use Kali Linux for a DAW? It's designed for penetration testing.
Most linux distributions ship pipewire which handles everything that Jack, ALSA, and Pulseaudio does, including many of the advanced low latency features.
Moreover, it's no longer required to recompile Linux to get the realtime features, that ships by default these days.
Hell, Pop_OS! has better support for my headphones than Windows ever had. Windows decided that 1% should be "excruciatingly loud and unlistenable", whereas in Linux it shows me the interfaces available and lets me select a different audio routing.
That wasn't my answer, pay attention to people's username ;)
You haven't responded to the rest of my post, and your response of "If I can't do it on Kali Linux then it isn't possible because the poster said any Linux distro" honestly leads me to believe you're more interested in nitpicking arguments to "win", rather than debating and understanding. But, I'm going to be generous with my time and energy here and answer nonetheless.
In response to "Which distro?", literally any of the general purpose ones that have an update of this year. Whatever distros come up when you type how to move from windows to linux into google.
A quick search shows that Linux Mint and Zorin are kind of favoured in articles. But hell, Pop_OS!, Fedora, Ubuntu, whatever. You're probably not going to turn Kali or Puppy Linux into a perfect DAW environment without a lot of tweaking, but a simple google shows a bunch of suggested distributions that would work fine, and a specialist search of "linux distributions for audio production" would get you a better selection. None of these distributions you generally have to tweak a whole bunch, at least any more than you would have to tweak windows 11 to get it working right without advertising in the desktop (lmao).
We are a long way away from having to deal with Pulseaudio, Pipewire was feature complete for general purpose use in 2021 before it even hit 1.0, and almost all distributions now ship it, that's how much of an improvement to the Linux audio stack it is. Linux audio is good enough now that big audio companies like e.g. Presonus, are now supporting Linux: https://support.presonus.com/hc/en-us/articles/1921455826958...
And tools like VCV Rack work OOTB on Linux, I even got an Interesting copy of Renoise running in WINE out of the box.
There's a whole bunch more, too. A good bunch of these work on Linux, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8HvTr_q2Yw (Although you'd be better off with Ardour, which is listed)
My mistake then, doesn't change the point of my remark, as the OP was Indeed asserting any distro.
Your lengthy response is a good example of Linux forums, that eventually I got tired to visit, though.
Remember my first distro used kernel 1.0.9, and I still use Linux distros at work, just not on my own laptops, so I am quite aware of the tweaking that never went away.
Your claims that "Linux is not a good DAW" does not match up with my experience of opening the Pop_OS! store this weekend, clicking "install" on Furnace and Ardour, and instantly having a way to make music, or of setting up my headphones on Linux, which worked instantly when I plugged them in and let me open "Settings > Sound" to click which chipset of the headphone was used (digital/analogue) to fix the fact that 1% of volume was far too much (doing this is impossible in Windows, because I tried it back when I ran windows -- you just have to be deafened, I assume).
I think that's the issue, you're a moderate power user so feature discoverability is more natural to you. I guess the issues his family had were related to things not functioning how Windows or macOS does (although Mint is pretty Windows focused) hopefully Zorin is much more user-friendly to casual users.
I reviewed ZorinOS last year when considering going all-in on Linux at home last year, testing around 30 distributions.
While it wasn't a good fit as a techie, I rated Zorin the best distro for 'general desktop computing' for "normal" people who have used Windows their whole life.
I was impressed by how integrated and easy to use the desktop environment was. Now, this is not a statement of Gnome vs KDE etc etc, it is of the experience of using it - e.g. simple settings for making the general OS feel like Windows or MacOS, lots of sensible things.
I have my eye on COSMIC Desktop, but ultimately decided Fedora was a better fit for me from a perspective of 'latest stuff with less hassle, mostly stable' as a technical person.
The real comparison is 'stable distribution for developer/techie type people' vs 'stable distribution that is easy to use for newbies'. Zorin is the latter, comparing the two doesn't quite make sense. If you are the former, you wouldn't pick ZorinOS.
Not to say you can't do anything on Zorin you couldn't on PopOS, but the point of Zorin is a well integrated operating system for non-technical people, which means packages won't always be latest because they want to ship a stable operating system for non-technical people.
If you had an older system and wanted to use it for basic web type activities, Zorin would probably be a better fit for that scenario
Pop OS has a whole new desktop metaphor. That doesn't bother a techie; it can totally throw non-technical folks.
Zorin coerces GNOME into a Windows-like design, but unlike too many distros, it looks good while doing it, and the paid version comes with a tonne of apps pre-installed and paid support.
> and the paid version comes with a tonne of apps pre-installed
I didn't like the way they sell this on their page, "Bundled with alternatives to over $5,000 of professional software". They list the commercial alternatives with their prices but no mention of what's the bundled alternative. Probably the usual free software that any user with a modicum of familiarity with an app store can install in minutes.
The lack of transparency about what software they bundle, and the implication that this software is entirely equivalent to the commercial/professional one feels a bit dishonest and puts me off.
They say "alternative" right in the sentence. Not "replacement", not "superior choice", but "alternative". It's not at all dishonest to suggest GIMP as a bitmap editor, Inkscape for vectors or Blender for 3D meshing. Blender absolutely beats the pants off Maya and C4D, and frankly I think Inkscape and GIMP is easier to use than Illustrator and Photoshop.
You're kinda splitting hairs, here. If you've used Creative Cloud recently then you know it's downright awful compared to CS6.
> Not "replacement", not "superior choice", but "alternative". It's not at all dishonest to suggest GIMP as a bitmap editor, Inkscape for vectors or Blender for 3D meshing.
If anyone told you they need Photoshop for their work you wouldn't feel at all silly to offer MS Paint as "an alternative"?
Zorin's page doesn't name any alternative, just a lot of names of commercial software. They sure do suggest that the alternatives are reasonably equivalent to those, which is a huge stretch. I can think of 2-3 paid Office alternatives that would give MS Office a run for its money but that's not what Zorin offers and I have to find this out on Reddit instead of their own page. They bundle the free stuff that also comes with a most other Linux distributions.
> You're kinda splitting hairs, here.
I'm not the one trying to debate word definitions when the complaint was very clear. The vagueness and the framing of the comparison are intentionally misleading to sell a product. Bending over backwards to defend this behavior just draws even more attention to its sketchiness.
I have been using and administering macOS since 2002 and Linux since 1998. Zorin is my favorite distro when I need to put an OS on a machine and want a cohesive, well-designed, low hassle, free system for myself or others. It’s really well done and truly feels like a unit instead of the many, many disparate parts that it is made of.
Sure, you can do all of the things that it does in more custom ways assembling and using those disparate pieces yourself. Sure, it is probably less efficient on disk space and resources as it uses a variety of software installation approaches including Flatpak. Sure, its Windows compatibility is just Wine. Sure, it’s hard to find info on the main product page about what it’s actually running. None of those things matter when you want a computing system that is polished, free, and lets you start being productive instead of managing your system. If that’s not for you, don’t use it! You’ll be fine.
Not GP but Zorin is still Ubuntu under the hood, the main difference is that they really made a lot of Design decisions that are biased towards usability, specially for non-technical people (at arguably the expense of some Free Software principles).
The other more aesthetical aspect is that at least with Zorin 17 they really mimic Windows in a positive way, in that they leverage the 'muscle memory' of non-technical users.
My experience putting it on other people's laptops is that they just intuitively know where to find things because of how the DE is analogue to what they are already familiar with.
If you want to check out Zorin, or other popular Linux flavors, in your browser to see if you like them without having to install them on a VM/separate partition, try Distro Sea:
https://distrosea.com/
There's also quite a few good reviews on Zorin on YouTube.
People should also note Zorin sells a "pro" version for around $50. I'm sure most people could achieve the same features the pro edition has without much trouble, but it also helps them with development costs and everything else.
And in place upgrades! It was a massive problem for years with Zorin (and still exists with other "user friendly" distros like Elementary), requiring a full system reinstall every time a new version released.
That being said, I still think this is a bit of a strange option when there's several Ubuntu flavors with more Windows-esque desktops, plus Linux Mint which offers a lot of these benefits with a much larger userbase and therefore better support (though Zorin is more "modern" looking). Not a bad option but not one I'd think to recommend often.
They are not universally portable, but if your running an Ubuntu derived system, most debs can be installed jus fine. Thats not because deb is so compatible,but because virtually everything assumes Ubuntu.
You need the .deb files to match your architecture and to have the necessary dependencies available, but for programs like Google Chrome, Discord, and VSCode, those dependencies seem to come down to "any recent version of glibc and openssl" and the .debs themselves are available for multiple architectures.
You're not going to be installing random Debian packages from the Debian FTP server, but for most proprietary software that resorts to "install this .deb", it'll work most of the time, which beats many other distributions.
On the other hand, installing software this way is a great way for upgrades to the next major version to fail spectacularly halfway through, so I'm not so sure if it's a feature or not.
“Bundled with alternatives to over $5,000 of professional software”
That sounds spammy and misleading to me. I’m assuming they’re just including open source alternatives and assuming the same value as commercial offerings.
>Zorin OS is built on the same Open Source software that powers the New York Stock Exchange and computers on the International Space Station.
>Thanks to the advanced security features of Linux, Zorin OS is resistant to PC viruses and malware
The whole landing page is full of those statements. It seems like they are targeting a demographics with low tech literacy, but I don't know how productive those statements are really.
> It seems like they are targeting a demographics with low tech literacy
True, and often overlooked in the world of Linux.
> but I don't know how productive those statements are really.
What it really means is that it comes with 20GB of so of preinstalled Flatpak apps for a whole bunch of use cases: graphic art, sound and music production, video and podcast editing, live streaming, etc.
Stuff you need domain-specific knowledge to find and install on Linux, and which on Windows costs real money and probably will get you a tonne of spyware, ad banners etc.
Nothing vastly demanding if you have the knowledge.
Rather than giving you an app store and leaving you to it to find it, learn it, navigate it, and find the apps you need and avoid anything dodgy, they take a whole catalogue of premium big-name FOSS apps and preload the lot.
It's big, and when I reviewed it, it filled my VM and then a real disk partition -- but in real life, you nuke Windows and dedicate a laptop to this, and then it's fine.
It's simultaneously too much and too little. If the reader is genuinely a tech layperson, eg, someone who grew up on iPad and nothing else, then "open source" and "Linux" are just confusing filler words and a better statement would be
"Zorin OS is built from the same software that powers the New York Stock Exchange and computers on the International Space Station.
Thanks to its advanced security features, Zorin OS is resistant to PC viruses and malware."
The root is that the writers are pushing Linux, and writing through that lens, instead of internalizing the ur-problem that the readers have of "needing to get off Windows" (for whatever reason) and writing content that addresses that.
Commented this above, but I've had freinds and family ask about alternatives to windows lately because of privacy concerns or just being unhappy with it. I've been sending them the link to the ZorinOS page, and it's been popular with them. It convinced my dad to try Zorin on a new laptop they were buying, and he's been happy with it.
I would think if somebody could figure out how to install an OS just being given a link to that page, they're probably savvy enough that they could figure out how to use something like Ubuntu. But really, in your case, the marketing copy on their site isn't really doing much, your family got there because of the word-of-mouth reference.
If somebody is navigating to a website for an OS, they already have some sort of clue that a new OS would be solving their problem, which indicates that they do have some level of understanding beyond what most people would. Really the average computer user today doesn't know that an OS is a separable part of their computer... most people think of computers as "Mac computers", or "Windows computers".
In the case of my dad's computer, I installed Zorin for him. However the website itself convinced him that Zorin was what he wanted instead of windows.
Those two statements rubbed me the wrong way (more than the $5000 statement). Reminds me of military-grade encryption, etc. Completely void of any meaning, but sounds great to laypeople.
My father has gotten distrustful of windows, and wanted an alternative. I sent him a link to the Zorin home page, and it convinced him to try it out on a new laptop they were buying (I installed it for them). They've been quite happy with it, and I expect they'll want to swap over their other PC as well.
So it seems to me that this homepage was very successful, at least in this case of a linux user being able to recommend it to a non-techie.
But for many, they wouldn't even know this was possible. Yes, when you look into it it will be all the usual software, but 95% of people don't even know there is a world beyond windows and macOS, so that might be something that gets them to look for a couple of minutes and consider they might be able to use this.
I would add - I don't mind them describing it like that, the questionable part is how the advertising heavily implies that to get access to that software you have to buy the "Pro" version. The software is of course free and available to install on the "non-pro" version, it just doesn't get installed during installation, and they're definitely betting on people not knowing this detail and buying "Pro" to get the listed software.
I don't think that's misleading. There are a lot of people out there who aren't aware that free software exists that provides a lot of the functionality of software that costs $999. They clearly say "alternatives to".
I was trying to make a point about how funny the parent post was, saying it isn't misleading while misunderstanding it and thinking that it means "paid-for software that would have cost $5,000". But perhapes I didn't understand the comment itself.
I personally think the messaging is fine, but the above comment was a clear example that some people could get it wrong.
But gimp doesn't provide the functionality of software that costs $999. That's why it's misleading. It's probably more like Affinity Photo which is £68.
Whole Affinity pack is 10% of Photoshop while providing more functionality (just Affinity Designer handles vectors like Illustrator while edits pixels as well).
Gimp finally has non-destructive editing, so is almost in same category as those two. And Krita is good for pixels as well.
I think that's mostly there to give people confidence that they'll have real, quality software available. A concern for new linux users is that they'll be missing software they need, that statement expresses that there will be a lot of software available, and that the quality is comparable to profession quality.
My only issue with this project is that, after navigating the webpage for a while, I can't see _any_ reference to open source software, and compliance with their licenses.
They should at least put a link anywhere in the webpage, where people can click and at least be redirected to their components.
I know compliance is about "you only provide it if asked for", but they could be a bit more proactive and _embrace_ that they are using FOSS, not merely try to sell it.
By the way: How does selling of the Pro version work with GPL? Or is it covered because they offer the Core version?
I miss my early days of CS college and tinkering with distro installs and installs and so on. In fact it was so fulfilling that it felt like “cooking your own meal”. I never used Windows. So in last two decades my experience has been Linux distros to osx/macos. If it was not for the internet cafe computer+internet usage before college (had no other exposure to either, otherwise) my experience of Windows would have been absolutely ZERO which is what it is now.
I wish OEMs had made Linux distros first class citizens for their laptops and computers and I wish these distros also imagined “regular people” using their OS/software. I guess both never happening kinda kept nullifying each other. Maybes it’s too late now?
In fact there was a time (around a decade ago?) when the Linux based laptops had started becoming kinda “normal” — I remember buying a Linux Dell Vistro with Linux pre-installed from Dell, had helped a friend buy an XPS with linux pre-installed. We both haven’t touched anything other than a Mac in a really long time and last two times I had to buy a laptop I found zero Linux options (in India) — let alone “good” options.
PS. Oh, my favourite was always Elementary OS even though it was clearly in beta when I migrated to the macs. There was just something about that distro.
> I wish OEMs had made Linux distros first class citizens for their laptops and computers
What more are you waiting for? Pretty much the only holdout is Nvidia, and they don't really make great laptop chips anyways. Almost every x86 chipset with UEFI and ACPI supports Linux to some degree. At this point, if your chip isn't running Linux it's because you've made a concerted effort to prevent users from accessing the bootloader.
When people say 'first class citizen' I feel like it's always a moving goalpost. First it's 'working WiFi drivers' but Broadcom modems have been supported for a decade now. Then it's 'proper Wayland support' but even Nvidia has a working Wayland session now. So then the goalpost moves to 'but I want Wayland on XFCE' and the cycle starts anew. These days, the 'regular people' workload I see on most computers boils down to gaming and running Google Chrome. Linux does both of those fine; it's the culture that has to change before people accept it. Look at how successfully the Steam Deck penetrated the market.
"First class citizen" never moved that much other than Bluetooth being kind of a requirement now, since it's increasingly hard to find good headphones that use 1/8" jack.
Elementary's terminal emulator and the notification bell which rang every time my computer finished a bell is embedded in my brain. I learned how to program properly on that OS and enjoyed every minute of it.
first linux is just the kernel, you can't do much with only the kernel, you have to target a distro.
But which distro to target?, Ubuntu, Linux mint or fedora, or all of them. That would take a lot of effort to developing and validating (And no, we don't only validate the kernel, it's not enough).
I remember seeing this a few years ago. It certainly looked interesting, and maybe something I could convince my parents to use.
I've been so entrenched in Linux for the last two decades and have come to Stockholm-syndrome myself enough to genuinely like modern Gnome desktop, and Sway nowadays, so a part of me isn't completely sure why you'd want Windows on Linux, but of course I'm not the target audience for something like Zorin.
That said (and this is coming from a guy who is running Linux on the computer typing this and has spent a lot of time customizing Sway [1] and lots of other tinkering to the desktop), I'm skeptical of the claim that moving to Linux will be "faster". I haven't used Windows 11 yet at all, but for day-to-day desktop use I haven't really noticed Windows being slower than Linux. I haven't done benchmarks but I doubt the people running something like Zorin will either; it's all vibes based, and personally I don't really think that Linux feels faster than Windows, at least not Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10.
I used this (pro) for a few years.
It is ok but it does not have any particular feature I found
worth the cost of the upgrades.
I bought the current version back then.
I dont remember the number so X.
Less than a month later they released the new version X+1 and that
was at €39 I believe for a discounted upgrade.
(numbers may not be 100% accurate it has been a while)
But they do have a free version and that is nice of them.
The full price is 48+tax, so 44+tax for the upgrade sounds wrong.
I personally use Mint/Ubuntu with XFCE which I found it to be the closest to my work habit and the closer to Windows (I use both Linux and Windows).
About ZorinOS Pro, I think it is too expensive. They are competing with Free Windows, Free MacOS, and Free Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch. That said, if it works for them, let them be. AS long as they respect the GPL/LGPL and contribute back, I don't see a problem.
I’m glad that there are distros catering towards less techy people. Linux needs this. But I take issue with selling open source projects that could otherwise be downloaded for free.
The $48 Pro version resells open source software (Blender is mentioned on their website) and slaps on a few themes. Even if legal, this just seems highly unethical.
They aren't selling a product (open-source software). They are selling a service - the effort to customise the distro and package it with free, useful softwares. Hopefully, they also donate some time and money back to those free, open-source softwares. Note also that GPL has never been hostile towards commercial software. In fact, with MySQL (before it was owned by Oracle), the FSF even endorsed MySQL's dual-license open-source business model.
> it is highly unethical to resell open source software produced by volunteers intending to make their work free.
Why? ZorinOS users can still download Blender for free if they don't pay for the mega-pack. You have to imagine that it's not very hard for Zorin to follow GPL guidelines ("here are your 13,000 source tarballs, good sir") with this business.
You also can't prove that any of these volunteers are against downstream repackaging of their work. If they were really ideologically against the idea of people being able to sell Free Software, then they probably wouldn't be putting time into a GPL project. Commercial redistribution of GPL software has been a thing since the 90s, with much larger pricetags than $48.
Strongly disagree on the "unethical" part.
Maintaining a distribution is a lot of work, and the infrastructure also costs money.
Paying for the distribution of software is totally fine. You are not even forced to pay anyway.
I disagree with them, I find selling free software to be a pretty solid and ethical way of funding free software, but why would they not have the right to have an opinion on this?
I certainly have strong opinions about many software vendors, who distribute proprietary software, often full of ads and tracking on top of that, why would I not have the right to find that strongly unethical?
Since it seems to be without any grounds that the other user is anonymously accusing named individuals of acting unethically, I wanted to ask what gives him that right?
If he has a real argument, let's look into it. If not, then he's slandering innocent people without any due and the question is then why in the world they should care about this persons opinion?
> the question is then why in the world they should care about this persons opinion?
Oh yeah, that's totally different. All we know if that this commenter finds the practice unethical and that's it. There's pretty much nothing one can do with this information without some further backing.
> he's slandering innocent people
That's a bit strong, they are just saying that it seems unethical. They find that maybe it's unethical. It's not less nuanced than that. Ethics is all about opinion anyway. We all have our own views on what's ethical and what's not so this can't be an objective statement from the start.
I know there's a place for distros like these, designed to be familiar to users of Windows or MacOS, but to me it shows Linux at its laziest: where exciting new ideas in system and UI design are skipped over, in favor of bad design ideas from 1995 (looking at you, Start menu). On MacOS and Windows you're stuck with whatever OS UI those respective corporations decide you get—the Apple menu, the Start menu, floating window management, and so on—and there's nothing inherently good about those paradigms; they mostly just exist for legacy reasons. On Linux, you have the freedom to customize everything, and to so it just seems sad that so much good development effort is going into building systems that value familiarity over innovation.
Put differently, I find it sad when user-friendliness is valued over user-centrism. Linux is full of software that is user-centric more than user-friendly: look at Vim, for instance, which is famously difficult to quit, yet is designed to be ergonomic and efficient in a way which puts the user first. The Vim philosophy (modal editing, ergonomic arrow keys, etc.) has even been extended to web browsers (Qutebrowser, for instance), and to window managers (i3, sway, etc.). These types of programs, in my opinion, are where Linux really shines.
Most people commenting here, however, describe this familiar/innovative or friendly/centric dichotomy in terms of user archetypes: "techie" and "normal" people. That feels unnecessarily essentialist, implying that "normal" people aren't curious enough to learn something unfamiliar, like a new style of user interface. But if we always assumed that, we'd never have had any innovative interfaces at all: mouse-driven desktop interfaces, smartphone touch screens, or any of it.
Of course, Linux distros are diverse enough to have something for everyone. I just think that conventional, familiar ones like this represent a missed opportunity.
> in favor of bad design ideas from 1995 (looking at you, Start menu)
For what it's worth, that's the point when your comment jumped the shark. I knew then that this was just a rant.
The Start menu was a _superb_ piece of design, as was Win95 in general. If nothing else, the existence proof of this is the sheer number of other desktops that imitate the design:
I could probably find more, but 24 should do for now. Even combining forks, there are over 20.
You may not like it, and that's a legitimate view I am not arguing with, but billions of people use desktop interfaces modelled upon it, representing the combined work of thousands of developers, reimplementing it in dozens of languages.
> the existence proof of this is the sheer number of other desktops that imitate the design
That's where you're wrong. The desktop environments that imitate Win95 elements do it to provide something familiar for their users. The KDE team is not sitting around going, "you know what was designed really well? The Start Menu!" In fact, many of the desktop environments you mention (GNOME Flashback, Cinnamon) were a conservative reaction to the new GNOME 3 design which broke from the Windows aesthetic. The Wikipedia page for Cinnamon, for instance, says it aims to "follow traditional desktop metaphor conventions" and aims for a "gentle learning curve." They're explicitly choosing familiarity over innovation.
> The Start menu was a _superb_ piece of design
Not really. It achieves a reasonably clean look, but at the expense of excessively hierarchicalizing programs and documents. GNOME's Activities panel allows you to click "Activities" then click the program you want to run. Even better, you can just tap the Super key, type a letter or two of the program, and press enter. On Windows 95, I remember trying to launch a calculator, and clicking Start, then clicking Programs, then clicking Utilities, then clicking Calculator. In 1995, lots of people were complaining about the Start Menu, how clunky it was and how it slowed down common tasks. GNOME 3's approach is better, as is MacOS's Launchpad, as well as lots of other desktop launchers.
> billions of people use desktop interfaces modelled upon it, representing the combined work of thousands of developers, reimplementing it in dozens of languages.
The idea that pervasive ideas are somehow good, just because they're popular, is a well-known logical fallacy called Argumentum ad Populum. The Start Menu was never good. It was just popular. One does not follow from the other.
> Even better, you can just tap the Super key, type a letter or two of the program, and press enter.
Most DEs do that today, including KDE, Cinnamon, Xfce (at least in some config), and Windows itself (although that last one does to much including web searches when you do this).
The categories in the start menu have its advantages, that's how I discovered what program exists and does what as a child in a KDE based distro. I fail to see what's wrong with a start menu + this feature you are citing. It does discovery + efficience very well. Gnome 3's Android-like icon grid without categories (from what I recall and from the screenshots I see) seems awful for discoverability seems awful. If you don't know the icon or the name of the program you are looking, the icon grid seems awful (although I recognize keyword search should get you there, but keyword search + the categories that other DE provide seems more useful - and today, it's rare to have deep hierarchies like in win95)
I disagree on all points. I suspect that you lack historical context to this design, and may be too young to thoroughly grasp it. I have read that younger people (millennials and younger) tend not to think in hierarchies and find them complex and difficult.
Tell me, what pre-Windows 95 GUI designs are you familiar with? I don't mean know slightly, I mean know well.
I agree that it's important for user-centrism to be a focal point of Linux, however I am also happy that distributions like this exist, yes you do lose some of the _magic_ of Linux by replicating a workflow a user is already used to, however this is perfect as non-technical people simply just don't care about that and just want to check their emails, social media, do some shopping, research stuff and watch some content online. They don't need to learn user-centric workflows like Vim to do such a thing.
As a longtime Mac user, I kinda wish it had a start menu. So much useful stuff easily accessible. But also, none of those choices affect my productivity all that much.
I'm both. (Mac and Windows since 1988, before Linux existed.) The point of the start menu is that you can search; the point of Spotlight is that the computer searches.
With Spotlight, you're telling the computer to run something you know is there, without bothering looking for it. You need to know it's there.
With a dedicated app launcher, such as say the macOS Launchpad, you can explore what apps are available to you. Once you know, you can quickly open it with cmd+space and 2-3 letters.
You can't open things that aren't there. You need to find what's available.
They are different tools for different purposes, which is why Launchpad is also there.
Exactly, except the problem with Launchpad is it's cumbersome and takes up the entire screen. I never use it, just have to know exactly what I'm looking for and use cmd-space.
And how do you acquire that knowledge? Browsing. Looking and reading, and remembering.
Mac OS X had no mechanism for this, but iOS does. iOS's Springboard launcher is lifted directly from the Dashboard in OS X "Tiger". Apple simplified it for the phone to only show apps. Then later they grafted it back in its simplified phone form -- Dashboard having been removed in the meantime.
Before that you had to browse the filesystem. To do that you need to know where to look.
That's how it worked on classic MacOS, and Windows 1 and 2, and DR-GEM, and AmigaOS, and RISC OS, and basically all other 1980s GUIs.
(Proprietary Unix left you with a terminal. Job done.)
The innovation in Windows 3 was having an app launcher program with groups. It was called Program Manager. It had groups, because it's quicker to look in the group related to what you want than in all apps. ProgMan was stolen from OS/2 1.1 by the way.
Win 95 had a further innovation that built on that. It shrank Program Manager down from a full-screen app to a single button, that opened up on a hierarchical list, and that list had icons in it because some people are more visual and recognise icons better than names.
Me, I'm a reader, I want words not pictures. Pictures waste my time and my screen space. That's why it's important to offer a choice. GNOME takes away choice. The GNOME devs have a Vision and you must use it. The KDE devs don't have a vision. They have nearly as many visions as developers, and they try to accommodate all of them.
Not everyone: just the devs. Examples:
* I use widescreens. We all use widescreens now. I want the title bars on the side, like in wm2, not on top. That's not an option.
* I liked BeOS. I think title bars should be tabbed, like in web browsers. That's not an option.
* I hate hamburger menus. I want menu bars. There is no global option for that. You can't have it.
* I hate CSD. I want a title bar I can middle-click to send behind all other windows, like KDE 1, 2, 3 and 4 did, as well as every other non-GNOME desktop. I also liked Windowblinds on classic MacOS: the ability to roll up windows into the title bar. Again, like in some older KDE versions. There's no option for that any more.
There is important choice, accommodating different needs and usage patterns, and there is cosmetic choice, merely affecting how things look but not the underlying mechanisms of how they work.
Supporting diversity of usage is more important than diversity of appearance.
Both the full desktops that natively support Wayland fail to do this.
I've been doing tech support since 1988. I've seen many many PCs with hundreds of apps, some maybe heading into thousands, sometimes with custom hackery to get different versions running in parallel and stuff.
Yes this is a thing. It is common.
And the typical user does not know what an "app" is, or what OS they are using. I've lost count of the number of people that told me their computer was running Word or Office (not Windows), or who think they access the Web via Google because they don't know what a web browser is.
If you can name the 20 apps you use the most often, you are the elite of the elite, the top 1% of 1% of computer users.
Normal people are not like that. They don't know what they use or what it's called or what OS they run or what an "OS" is, and they outnumber us by approximately a million to one.
I used to work tech support as well... For this case if I was on a user machine and needed to browse for apps I would open Finder.app and navigate to /Applications, this is what I did even with Launchpad existing because it's more convenient to navigate and search as it's just a standard window instead of some full screen thing. This would mean I could continue reading documentation alongside the finder window.
> sometimes with custom hackery to get different versions running in parallel and stuff.
Most users just aren't doing this, they open up their Mac, install a few applications and then just use it as intended; they don't need to customise things and wouldn't care to spend the time even if it benefited them. If they are capable of implementing these custom hacks and things they are likely intelligent enough to navigate via Finder and Spotlight for almost all use cases.
> If you can name the 20 apps you use the most often, you are the elite of the elite, the top 1% of 1% of computer users.
I don't think so, most people I know whether that's friends or colleagues (some technical, some not) use maybe 3–5 apps:
Browser
Word Processer
Spreadsheets
Notes
Task Management (reminders, asana, jira or something)
Music Player (some just use the browser)
people don't have 20+ applications to remember day in day out.
Hell even as a power user I only really use:
Terminal
Browser
IDE
Creative Tools (Logic, Final Cut, Compressor, etc.)
Notes
Reminders
Music Player
The only UNIXes that I consider ever caring for the whole experience as a full stack, for users and application developers alike, were Irix, Sun NeWS, Solaris, NeXTSTEP and its evolution as OS X.
Sure you can argue Linux distributions can also offer something similar, the problem is which flavours and for how long, which brings us to shipping the Linux kernel underneath Java and Web frameworks, as being the most successful approach thus far.
Whatever distro which is pre-installed on the computer you buy, or whatever your geek acquaintance picks, or whatever you pick as a geek yourself (any mainstream distro will do).
> for how long
The lifetime of the computer in all of the cases, or, in the last case, until you want to try out something else.
Not sure what's your point, netbooks like the eee PC are starting to become ancient history anyway.
When it comes to our current era, Dell, Lenovo and HP computers sold with Linux are fine, and there's KDE-related hardware that seem nice too [1] (at KDE they understood that it's important to be the default OS, so they are pushing towards this). system76 too I've heard. Obviously choice is more limited than for Windows (although macOS is doing well with limited choice too), more biased towards pro, but there are decent options. The installed distros are quite standard too, there's some customization but not more than what we see on Windows computers.
Being Ubuntu based, I really think Zorin should be combining efforts with Linux Mint. There is quite a bit of work duplicated here. IMO Mint is the prime project; I prefer an ideal form of the core OS to a facade of others. Mint's choices have, as a side-effect, made it rather familiar anyways.
Clement Lefevbre is French, and Artyom and Kyrill Zorin are Ukrainian, although they grew up in Dublin. I met them and had lunch with them. They sound like it. :-)
The big difference is that Mint is free and runs on donations; the premium Zorin OS edition is paid-for and had paid support.
I can't see how the business models would combine. But, apart from that, I think you're right.
Both have an Xfce edition, and in Zorin's case, it's free.
Mint's flagship has a fork of GNOME 3 called Cinnamon. Zorin uses real upstream GNOME, but with pre-installed GNOME extensions to recreate a Windows-like desktop. Zorin sponsors Dash-to-Panel, and was involved in the original fork from Dash-to-Dock. It also uses Arc menu and a bunch of other extensions, and they're on Github, but they're not in the GNOME extensions store.
And there's also GNOME Flashback, which is a separate Windows-like desktop based on GNOME $Current tech, but maintained by the GNOME team.
There must be some way to combine these things and make a better experience with the combined efforts, but none of the three companies wants it.
Just because you can charge for open source software, doesn't make it moral to do so. Concentrating our efforts on making Debian even easier to use seems much more in line with the ethics of the FOSS ecosystem.
It's a catchy name that I haven't seen in very many places. A few years back, I met a salesman named Zorin. I thought for a moment and realized that was the name of a Bond villain (played by Christopher Walken). I mentioned it to him, and he said that his mom had named him after the character.
The OS looks interesting, and may be appealing to non-power users who want more freedom and/or privacy.
This looks like my favorite for installing on relative's PCs before the Windows 10 sunset - I'm just a bit worried about Dual Boot, I've heard some stories about hiccups there. Does anyone have comments about how Dual Boot works with Zorin today, or general experience with that use case?
For what it's worth, Windows 10 will sunset in two years. You can pay $30/year for security updates (or get updates for free by enabling Windows Backup or spending Microsoft Reward Points you earn by using Bing) and keep using Windows 10 until programs stop working, which will probably take a while with the current status.
My advice on dual booting Linux in general:
1. Resize the partition from Windows if you're going to install to the same disk
2. Do not use MBR mode to install anything. Windows updates will break your Grub bootloader, and Grub updates will break the Windows bootloader. Most PCs default to UEFI these days already, but it's always good to check
3. If at all possible, use the computer's UEFI OS dialog rather than chainloading Windows from the Linux bootloader. Kind of requires a user-friendly motherboard GUI, but if Bitlocker decides to turn itself on, you'll be struggling with recovery keys a lot less if you let both bootloaders just manage themselves.
4. If that's not possible or the motherboard OS selection sucks ass, and Bitlocker is enabled, write down the recovery key, boot through the Linux bootloader once (Windows will notice the boot process changed and prompt for a recovery key), and enter the recovery key. After a reboot, Bitlocker should unseal when booting from the Linux bootloader automatically, and now directly booting from the motherboard OS selection will require the recovery key.
5. If you're going to use a new disk, make sure to create a sufficiently large UEFI partition (>1GB, storage is cheap these days!) so bootloader/kernel updates don't break in the coming years.
6. Not really a dual booting issue, but if you're doing tech support for your relative, do yourself a favour and set up a tool like Timeshift (including automatic snapshots on updates, and if your configuration permits automatic integration into Grub). It'll offer system restore-like features, allowing you to revert the system to a known-good configuration in case an update breaks something. Timeshift itself works best on btrfs installs, but it'll also work in rsync mode on any file system, and other tools like it exist.
Great tips, especially the recovery keys. I wouldn't have thought of that, thank you. One question, some distros like Pop OS offer drive encryption as part of the installation process. Do you know whether that would affect the whole disk (and hence could replace Bitlocker) or only the partition it lives on?
Around once a year I look for a distro that works on a laptop w/fractional scaling and hibernate. I’ve already done that once this year, if Zorin can handle that then maybe 2026 will my personal year of the linux desktop
Basically every linux marketing ever: a polished desktop theme that is familiar to windows users and works on old machines, also never mentioning this is a linux.
They mean through proton, which is Valve's compatibility layer based on wine. It was made for the arch-based steam deck but can be used on most (any?) distros. IME it works surprisingly well, although some games drop out when the anti-cheat gets updated, then might come back when proton updates.
It's a successor in name only; the company acquired the Freespire and Xandros brands. The product, sadly, is unrelated. (I say "sadly" because it had a pretty good desktop based on KDE 2.x.)
If it wants to be better than Google, Apple and Microsoft desktop offerings, needs to be available on random shopping mall stores, with the same adoption complexity as the competition.
I assume it's due to marketing, but it really irks me that I have to scroll down to the bottom and click "View technical details about Zorin OS" to find out that this is a Linux distro build on top of Ubuntu...
It's in the homepage, in the blue and green parts near the middle (Reliable | Secure). But still, they have the place for windows and macos in the tagline, they could add linux.
I think I'm mostly agreeing with you.
In old newsprint there was a term "below the fold" with a literal meaning. If it's below the fold it's less important than what is "above the fold" since no one reads below the fold.
Is it burying the lede to point out that it's Linux (or GNU/Linux+Ubuntu extra packages how ever we want to pronounce it)? I would guess probably not.
On a 32" monitor in portrait mode I did have to scroll quite a bit to see those bits. It was worse on my phone, and was even worse on a landscape monitor. "It's Linux" is far less important than what Forbes has to say about it, and it being Linux is more important than it being privacy respecting (which probably means Firefox as the default browser) to the page authors, but who am I to question them. Maybe this is the year of the Linux desktop.
I believe, given their target audience, it doesn’t matter. The information is available for those who care, but for the non-technical user who is fed up with their current OS, the message is: “Feel at home on ZorinOS and experience a performance and security boost.”
They understand that technically-oriented people will research the OS and its underlying components, but their target audience isn’t technical. Therefore, bombarding them with overly technical details on the home page is counterproductive.
In my opinion, ZorinOS has effectively marketed itself.
Non technical audience won't be visiting a Linux distro website.
They will if they are sick of ads showing up in Windows or they heard there more tech focused friend talking about the benefits and decided to do some research.
If you are technical enough to care you'll find the info in 1 min. If you are not technical enough you won't even know what to do with the info.
I hope this succeeds where others have, well, not failed, but not had overwhelming success. Years ago I installed Linux Mint on a family member's computer but they got frustrated enough with it (and required my regular intervention enough) that we ended up switching away. Zorin boasting about you being able to play "an enormous library of your favorite games" or boasting about the vast software library feels like asking for trouble. It won't be long before users run into rough edges.
TBH in the current environment I still think the best OS for "revive an old computer for a not very tech savvy person" is ChromeOS. I've never tried the open source alternatives for that but I'd be much happier setting up a relative with a glorified browser as an OS than something that attempts to do everything.
The advantage of Zorin is that it comes with some level of Wine integration. If it detects that there's a Linux version of a Windows installer, it'll guide the user towards the Linux version instead, but opening .EXEs works quite well out of the box as well.
Getting a recent version of Wine on anything but Arch-based distros without some kind of confusing intermediary is quite tricky, so making Wine somewhat usable goes a long way for non-tech-savvy users.
I've seen Zorin on computers sold for cheap in several second-hand stores. All PCs that have no hope of running Windows 11 (and probably struggled to run Windows 10 before getting a RAM+SSD upgrade). For reusing old tech, it's not a bad solution, though some users might have someone install Windows 10 later anyway.
>. If it detects that there's a Linux version of a Windows installer, it'll guide the user towards the Linux version instead,
My anecdotal experience with the steam and steamOS has been that the windows versions of games run better via proton than their native linux versions.
One game i have didn't run even run when i was on windows, but the windows version worked in Linux..
>One game i have didn't run even run when i was on windows, but the windows version worked in Linux..
Was it an old game? Those tend to do that
>My anecdotal experience with the steam and steamOS has been that the windows versions of games run better via proton than their native linux versions.
This is very interesting, does anyone have insights into why? I can only guess the games/their engines are more mindful of optimizing their calls to the native windows APIs, which when translated turns out to be pretty efficient on the output side too
There's a joke that "the most stable Linux ABI is Win32". Like sibling commenters have pointed out, many Linux game ports either used system libraries that may or may not be compatible after years of changes, or bring along vendored libraries that may not play well. Valve tried to encourage Linux builds for games during their first foray into Linux gaming with the Steam Runtime, but even they have largely abandoned updating it in lieu of advancing WINE and sibling systems like DXVK, vkd3d-proton, dgvoodoo2, et al. Much more engineering effort goes into the Windows game tech stack than native Linux ones have.
For older games, the biggest advantage WINE has over Windows is WINE's prefix model, which lets you essentially build purpose built environments, not dissimilar to vendoring your dependencies into an OCI container. And if you're running a file system with CoW powers, those separate environments don't even take up a great deal of storage since the vast majority of the prefix is bit for bit identical.
The "native linux versions" are typically just the windows games with an old build of wine/proton/etc.
Depends, I've still got some of the end-90's Loki game ports. Those were 'real' Linux binaries but won't run on modern Linux distributions due to changes in core libraries. The big game engines (Unreal, Unity) and even smaller ones (Gamemaker, Godot, AGS) offer Linux runtime support.
> My anecdotal experience with the steam and steamOS has been that the windows versions of games run better via proton than their native linux versions.
I've experienced the same thing with game console emulators. The Windows version run smoother on Linux than natively compiled ones do.
My cousin got my grandmother moved to Linux Mint with some actual success. All she did was check her email and browse the internet, and Linux can do that perfectly competently.
Same story here. Purchased a System76 machine for my ex-wife's grandmother. She "enjoyed learning about the new system". As a bonus she is now completely support scam immune, one of the advantages of the year of the Linux desktop not having happened yet.
Not going to lie, I feel a System76 machine is way overkill for someones grandmother who likely doesn't really need that kind of horsepower... Especially given the cheapest model they sell is 1400.
minus the cost of windows
minus the cost of supporting windows
minus the cost of malware and virii on windows
hmm, so that works pretty well, IMHO :-P
Windows is like 80? For the average user the average cost of supporting windows is basically 80.
You can get windows laptops for $100–$500 just get one of those and put Linux on it? Not a single person's grandmother (except maybe that one that plays Skyrim) needs a $1400 laptop, total waste of resources.
My kid has an excellent Thinkpad I picked up for something like $500. Runs linux (NixOS, specifically) perfectly well. Even the fingerprint reader works! And if he spills something on it, replacing it is substantially less awful.
Yep, pre-owned Thinkpad is going to be your best option, slap a decent Linux distribution on it and that thing will run for years and years. No need to spend thousands on a laptop that will be used by a kid or an elderly person.
NixOS is honestly the most kid proof system imaginable
Not everyone is a broke college student. Especially grandmas.
Could have been one of the mini desktop models
That makes more sense
Honestly, iPad might have been better.
It depends of the person. I know many old people who struggle.with touch screens.
There's a big difference between noobs on their own and noobs with a competent relative.
Way back in the day, I set up my grandpa with Slackware and FVWM. Yeah, I had to edit a configuration file to add a program - but that also meant that once I set it up, it would never break.
> Zorin boasting about you being able to play "an enormous library of your favorite games" or boasting about the vast software library feels like asking for trouble. It won't be long before users run into rough edges.
Out of the top 1000 games on steam: https://www.protondb.com/dashboard
29 are "borked" (unplayable)
26 are "bronze" (issues playing like "might crash")
82 are "silver" ("runs with minor issues but is playable")
823 are "gold"/"platinum" (works perfectly with tweaks, and works perfectly ootb)
> TBH in the current environment I still think the best OS for "revive an old computer for a not very tech savvy person" is ChromeOS.
Only 52 games are listed as "certified" for proton on Chrome OS.
Proton isn't Wine. The version of Wine that Zorin ships won't run games quite so well.
Installing Steam and running games through Steam will fix that, but it won't help with users downloading the Epic Game Store or GOG or the Rockstar Launcher.
Having helped a few users get acclimated with Linux, I've found that there are always a few rough edges around games. Zorin seems to hide them very well out of the box, though, much better than any of the other distros I've tried.
> Proton isn't Wine.
Proton _is_ Wine. Fixes in Proton get upstreamed into Wine, and Valve hires developers to work on Proton, Wine, and Mesa. Wine isn't in the dark ages anymore and is able to run the majority of things you throw at it confidently and capably.
> but it won't help with users downloading the Epic Game Store or GOG or the Rockstar Launcher.
That's... why we have Lutris? You literally cannot shake a stick without coming across those. Even just typing "epic games on linux" into google and being a dumbass that reads the AI overview, it will tell you that Heroic and Lutris exist: https://i.imgur.com/KBiw1cR.png
After that, you just click some buttons that are clearly marked and wait for things to install, and it just works: https://i.imgur.com/XUFJaUu.png
To be clear, I literally just did this because I wanted to try Fall Guys on my laptop with an aggressively underpowered graphics card. It took only minimal intervention from me (clicking "install" and "next", and then logging in to Epic).
It's not as seamless as hitting "Install" on Steam would be, but if you're able to mod games on Windows (i.e. "follow instructions") you're more than able to deal with the state of gaming on Linux in the present day, and in many ways it is somewhat easier than Windows with the way Linux handles software upgrades.
> Proton _is_ Wine
I think it's fairer to say Proton includes Wine, because it ships with software that is not part of Wine such as DXVK.
Ok yes, Proton is a distribution of Wine, incorporating fixes that then get upstreamed, and some other software that users typically want to pull down.
If you open up `winetricks` in a default installation, you can just select to install all of these extra components yourself -- including DXVK (Not that I'm suggesting that someone who is green-eared does that without a guide, but it is literally just clicking checkboxes and then "OK"), and Lutris is another kind of Wine distribution that manages your games and pulls down these extra libraries for you. Most people either add stuff as non-steam games (which handily keeps track of all of the games for you too), which lets you run it via Proton, or just uses Lutris (or Heroic I guess).
But like, even the default distribution of Wine is able to handle things very, very capably now and a lot of things that required tinkering JustWork(tm). I say that as someone who ran a single Arch Linux distribution for 7 years straight back in the mid-late 2010s
I find protondb misleading because GTA V is supposedly "Gold" except Online does not work at all because of anti-cheat. Same goes for many other popular multiplayer games.
FYI: FydeOS[0] is ChromeOS without google services
[0]: https://fydeos.io/
I'm curious about whether FydeOS would get in the way of technical work or just be another Linux for most things?
I mean, while it technically supports Linux, it’s all in a VM just like normal Chrome OS. It’s not any better for technical work than chrome is in that sense.
I'm surprised to hear that about Linux Mint. I installed it on an ancient laptop for my octogenarian mother and she could get around in it just fine after I explained to her how to use their 'store' to install apps. The interface is quite intuitive, I felt.
My guess is if you are comfortable on Windows then Mint is perfect and works how you expect, if you come from macOS then perhaps Elementary would be better for you.
Zorin negates this worry entirely and allows you to install one OS for everyone and then just choose the Windows or Mac mode depending on the end-user.
I was under the impression that elementary had stopped being as good since the pandemic because of the founder leaving. Is that not true?
Something that I believe is dragging down “mass audience” sorts of distros like Zorin is that they’re only Windows-like in a vague sense, leaving them in an “uncanny valley” of sorts. One of these distros really needs to commit to the bit of Windows-like-ness so it’s a seamless drop-in to the greatest degree possible.
I don't know, when I installed a linux distro with xfce on her laptop after he hdd died it took my partner months to realize she wasn't using windows.
I mean she only figured out libreoffice was installed instead of the pirated copy of office she used to run and complained the menus were different. Little she knew that a more recent version of Office would too have different menus/items placement anyway.
This probably depends on the user. Someone leaning less technical might not catch on or care, but someone who’s even just technical enough to be able to get themselves in trouble probably will. The more technical one becomes, the more tuned into the details of their OS and the more likely it is for those details to become incorporated into their workflow. When those details change it’s then hard to miss.
So there’s some number of users who could probably just be switched over by PC vendors preinstalling Linux, but there’s other groups who’d benefit from something more truly Windows-like.
Aside from those groups, I think there’s a crowd that could be attracted by simply selling your distro as being like “Windows when it was still good, except this time you get to keep it forever”. I think there’s a decent number of people who’ve become fatigued with modern Windows but don’t care enough to switch who’d be pushed over the edge by a distro that’s a near perfect reproduction of XP, 7, etc. Nostalgia can be a powerful motivator.
Heh, I know people who are using a Windows PC for decades yet legitimately don't know what "Windows" is. They have a PC. They work in Word. They browse in Chrome. They have no knowledge whatsoever as to what Windows is.
How long ago was this? There hasn't been a "more recent version of Office" for quite some time, so I suspect that this happened a while ago. Things have changed a lot, let me count the ways...
The rise of smartphones has eliminated an entire class of computer users. People who just want to do some Google searches, chat on Facebook, etc. can just use phones, and they do. (Caveat: I think a lot of people in the 30-50 age group still prefer a PC, because that's what they're used to, but that cohort is a one-off and is slowly diminishing. Furthermore, I've observed that as people near retirement, they are less interested in sitting in front of a computer screen, which will diminish this cohort relatively soon).
So who still uses a computer? I think it's just PC gamers, highschool/college students, and white-collar professionals.
PC gamers are very satisfied with the state of Linux, because games are relatively simple applications, and the Linux ecosystem has been able to provide a great compatibility environment for Windows games.
Students and professionals are less likely to be satisfied with Linux, and it's not really Linux's fault, but a lot of software just doesn't work on Linux. And even if it did, small issues like case-sensitive filesystems could easily provide enough friction to prevent these users from switching. Lastly, these users are willing to spend a modest amount of money to save them time, and a Windows PC with the cost of the OS bundled isn't exactly expensive. Windows 10 was released over 10 years ago, and these users are likely to buy a new PC within that time, meaning they'll always get the latest Windows version, so upgrading their OS isn't really something they think about.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying any of this is good or correct or moral or non-cringe, I'm just saying that this is the real reason why Linux adoption is a more complex issue these days.
> How long ago was this? There hasn't been a "more recent version of Office" for quite some time, so I suspect that this happened a while ago. Things have changed a lot, let me count the ways...
2 years ago but her computer had been installed at least 6 or 7 years before, that was Office 2016 period I believe. Granted the ribbon already existed but the default placements of a number of elements were slightly different than what you see in Office 365 today.
My point is that she didn't really care or realize it wasn't windows until she asked me for MS Office and I told her I couldn't install it on this Linux OS and that I didn't have any license for it. I think the respect the license part was what surprised her the most as a person who grew up in the digital age and got used to pasting random images found on the internet in social medias.
> Zorin boasting about you being able to play "an enormous library of your favorite games"
This has nothing to do with “zorin”. Proton, wine, lutris, are available for all Linuxes
There is genuine value in having it all set up out of the box, and not having to figure it out yourself.
I have been using Linux since the '90s and haven't used anything else in at least a decade, but I struggled to understand what all the pieces were and what I was supposed to do with them when I wanted to play a Steam game with my kid several months ago. I'm still not sure I did it right; I think I probably did install Lutris, maybe, but I have no idea what problem it is meant to solve.
OOC, what were the frustrations about? I jumped ship as soon as Ubuntu started shipping with Unity. For me, as a moderate power-user, it's been pretty smooth sailing so far.
As someone that nowadays lives mostly on Windows, and uses Linux since kernel 1.0.9 days, Unity DE was so much better experience than GNOME will ever be again.
After Unity got removed from Ubuntu as default DE, I eventually adopted XFCE.
I also enjoyed Unity, we're in a minority.
But I've found Ubuntu with Gnome 46 and a few tweaks to offer most of what I like about Unity (and macOS).
The "few tweaks" is exactly the problem.
On windows you have to apply "a few tweaks" just to get the start bar to stop showing advertising and work as it should. Windows users in the modern day have to do way more tweaks than Linux users do just to get a functional and unobtrusive operating system.
Which Linux users, from the myriad of Dritrowach rankings?
And no, many normies use Windows just as out of factory, as anyone that has had to fix the cousin's computer during a holidays visit is well aware.
Things got a bit deep into the discussion there for a minute so I'm lifting it out
> Your lengthy response is a good example of Linux forums, that eventually I got tired to visit, though.
It takes four times as much writing to refute bullshit as it does to write it.
My system works out of the box with basically no Tweaking other than clicking "install" on a bunch of things in the software installer.
Meanwhile Windows complaints that I have seen in the last few months from people in communities I am in:
"Is there any way to get windows to stop updating applications at random times? I have bad internet so if I'm trying to play games it lags me out in the middle of a match all the time"
"On Windows it seems like every app has a background task when I boot up that lets it do what it wants regardless of if I want it to"
"(misc comments about Windows 11 blocking Google Chrome)"
"I love Taskbar Tweaker but it errors on startup saying it can't load libraries and doesn't support windows 11, and won't work, and then I click ok and it works"
"Why is destiny 2 not using my GPU? I had to manually go through and select it to use my GPU lol"
"I want to play sims 2 but it doesn't work under windows 11 and I don't want to install a bunch of modding tools to get it to work, but VMWare/Virtualbox doesn't work because you can't do hardware acceleration without disabling a bunch of Windows bullshit" (The Sims 2 works out of the box on Wine and is rated Platinum on ProtonDB: https://www.protondb.com/app/3314070 )
"It is possible to keep the non-ai subscription to Office 365, but they hide it (link to article explaining how to tweak Windows)"
From what I've seen, Windows users tweak that shit just to get it to work normally, way more than I have ever had to touch my OS. Many of these things JustWork on Linux or are not problems.
Just try to count the amount of people trying to fix the goddamn context menu (right click) by going into the registry or god forbid the command line.
Windows is as constant of a PITA as Linux. But alas, these criticisms are never taken seriously.
> And no, many normies use Windows just as out of factory
Which means they do not "get a functional and unobtrusive operating system."
My experience of Windows users is that if they do not know how to tweak it, they complain about it.
> Which Linux users, from the myriad of Dritrowach rankings?
Any of them
A functional and unobtrusive OS, is one where people focus on doing work, instead of tweaking the OS to enable a beamer.
I would like to see someone using Kali Linux for a DAW, without issues, it is any of them, after all.
> I would like to see someone using Kali Linux for a DAW, without issues, it is any of them, after all.
Why would you use Kali Linux for a DAW? It's designed for penetration testing.
Most linux distributions ship pipewire which handles everything that Jack, ALSA, and Pulseaudio does, including many of the advanced low latency features.
Moreover, it's no longer required to recompile Linux to get the realtime features, that ships by default these days.
Hell, Pop_OS! has better support for my headphones than Windows ever had. Windows decided that 1% should be "excruciatingly loud and unlistenable", whereas in Linux it shows me the interfaces available and lets me select a different audio routing.
Confused over here, wasn't the answer "any of them"?!?
That wasn't my answer, pay attention to people's username ;)
You haven't responded to the rest of my post, and your response of "If I can't do it on Kali Linux then it isn't possible because the poster said any Linux distro" honestly leads me to believe you're more interested in nitpicking arguments to "win", rather than debating and understanding. But, I'm going to be generous with my time and energy here and answer nonetheless.
In response to "Which distro?", literally any of the general purpose ones that have an update of this year. Whatever distros come up when you type how to move from windows to linux into google.
A quick search shows that Linux Mint and Zorin are kind of favoured in articles. But hell, Pop_OS!, Fedora, Ubuntu, whatever. You're probably not going to turn Kali or Puppy Linux into a perfect DAW environment without a lot of tweaking, but a simple google shows a bunch of suggested distributions that would work fine, and a specialist search of "linux distributions for audio production" would get you a better selection. None of these distributions you generally have to tweak a whole bunch, at least any more than you would have to tweak windows 11 to get it working right without advertising in the desktop (lmao).
We are a long way away from having to deal with Pulseaudio, Pipewire was feature complete for general purpose use in 2021 before it even hit 1.0, and almost all distributions now ship it, that's how much of an improvement to the Linux audio stack it is. Linux audio is good enough now that big audio companies like e.g. Presonus, are now supporting Linux: https://support.presonus.com/hc/en-us/articles/1921455826958...
And tools like VCV Rack work OOTB on Linux, I even got an Interesting copy of Renoise running in WINE out of the box.
If you want to see a considered opinion on Linux for audio production, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idcGxMFwvv8
There's a whole bunch more, too. A good bunch of these work on Linux, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8HvTr_q2Yw (Although you'd be better off with Ardour, which is listed)
My mistake then, doesn't change the point of my remark, as the OP was Indeed asserting any distro.
Your lengthy response is a good example of Linux forums, that eventually I got tired to visit, though.
Remember my first distro used kernel 1.0.9, and I still use Linux distros at work, just not on my own laptops, so I am quite aware of the tweaking that never went away.
Your claims that "Linux is not a good DAW" does not match up with my experience of opening the Pop_OS! store this weekend, clicking "install" on Furnace and Ardour, and instantly having a way to make music, or of setting up my headphones on Linux, which worked instantly when I plugged them in and let me open "Settings > Sound" to click which chipset of the headphone was used (digital/analogue) to fix the fact that 1% of volume was far too much (doing this is impossible in Windows, because I tried it back when I ran windows -- you just have to be deafened, I assume).
> My mistake then, doesn't change the point of my remark, as the OP was Indeed asserting any distro.
It was supposed to be hyperbole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole
I took it as obvious that I was excluding specialised distros.
> so I am quite aware of the tweaking that never went away.
What tweaking? People tweak WIndows too.
As the comment further up this thread pointed out, you need to tweak Windows to make it " functional and unobtrusive operating system."
It's not ideal, but it was all either in the Ubuntu panel options or in gnome-tweaks. I did that once and I don't have to think about it again.
I think that's the issue, you're a moderate power user so feature discoverability is more natural to you. I guess the issues his family had were related to things not functioning how Windows or macOS does (although Mint is pretty Windows focused) hopefully Zorin is much more user-friendly to casual users.
I reviewed ZorinOS last year when considering going all-in on Linux at home last year, testing around 30 distributions.
While it wasn't a good fit as a techie, I rated Zorin the best distro for 'general desktop computing' for "normal" people who have used Windows their whole life.
I was impressed by how integrated and easy to use the desktop environment was. Now, this is not a statement of Gnome vs KDE etc etc, it is of the experience of using it - e.g. simple settings for making the general OS feel like Windows or MacOS, lots of sensible things.
how would you compare it with PopOS
I have my eye on COSMIC Desktop, but ultimately decided Fedora was a better fit for me from a perspective of 'latest stuff with less hassle, mostly stable' as a technical person.
The real comparison is 'stable distribution for developer/techie type people' vs 'stable distribution that is easy to use for newbies'. Zorin is the latter, comparing the two doesn't quite make sense. If you are the former, you wouldn't pick ZorinOS.
Not to say you can't do anything on Zorin you couldn't on PopOS, but the point of Zorin is a well integrated operating system for non-technical people, which means packages won't always be latest because they want to ship a stable operating system for non-technical people.
If you had an older system and wanted to use it for basic web type activities, Zorin would probably be a better fit for that scenario
For most purposes, much better.
Pop OS has a whole new desktop metaphor. That doesn't bother a techie; it can totally throw non-technical folks.
Zorin coerces GNOME into a Windows-like design, but unlike too many distros, it looks good while doing it, and the paid version comes with a tonne of apps pre-installed and paid support.
> and the paid version comes with a tonne of apps pre-installed
I didn't like the way they sell this on their page, "Bundled with alternatives to over $5,000 of professional software". They list the commercial alternatives with their prices but no mention of what's the bundled alternative. Probably the usual free software that any user with a modicum of familiarity with an app store can install in minutes.
The lack of transparency about what software they bundle, and the implication that this software is entirely equivalent to the commercial/professional one feels a bit dishonest and puts me off.
They say "alternative" right in the sentence. Not "replacement", not "superior choice", but "alternative". It's not at all dishonest to suggest GIMP as a bitmap editor, Inkscape for vectors or Blender for 3D meshing. Blender absolutely beats the pants off Maya and C4D, and frankly I think Inkscape and GIMP is easier to use than Illustrator and Photoshop.
You're kinda splitting hairs, here. If you've used Creative Cloud recently then you know it's downright awful compared to CS6.
> Not "replacement", not "superior choice", but "alternative". It's not at all dishonest to suggest GIMP as a bitmap editor, Inkscape for vectors or Blender for 3D meshing.
If anyone told you they need Photoshop for their work you wouldn't feel at all silly to offer MS Paint as "an alternative"?
Zorin's page doesn't name any alternative, just a lot of names of commercial software. They sure do suggest that the alternatives are reasonably equivalent to those, which is a huge stretch. I can think of 2-3 paid Office alternatives that would give MS Office a run for its money but that's not what Zorin offers and I have to find this out on Reddit instead of their own page. They bundle the free stuff that also comes with a most other Linux distributions.
> You're kinda splitting hairs, here.
I'm not the one trying to debate word definitions when the complaint was very clear. The vagueness and the framing of the comparison are intentionally misleading to sell a product. Bending over backwards to defend this behavior just draws even more attention to its sketchiness.
Link?
I have been using and administering macOS since 2002 and Linux since 1998. Zorin is my favorite distro when I need to put an OS on a machine and want a cohesive, well-designed, low hassle, free system for myself or others. It’s really well done and truly feels like a unit instead of the many, many disparate parts that it is made of.
Sure, you can do all of the things that it does in more custom ways assembling and using those disparate pieces yourself. Sure, it is probably less efficient on disk space and resources as it uses a variety of software installation approaches including Flatpak. Sure, its Windows compatibility is just Wine. Sure, it’s hard to find info on the main product page about what it’s actually running. None of those things matter when you want a computing system that is polished, free, and lets you start being productive instead of managing your system. If that’s not for you, don’t use it! You’ll be fine.
How does Zorin compare to the likes of Mint?
Not GP but Zorin is still Ubuntu under the hood, the main difference is that they really made a lot of Design decisions that are biased towards usability, specially for non-technical people (at arguably the expense of some Free Software principles).
The other more aesthetical aspect is that at least with Zorin 17 they really mimic Windows in a positive way, in that they leverage the 'muscle memory' of non-technical users.
My experience putting it on other people's laptops is that they just intuitively know where to find things because of how the DE is analogue to what they are already familiar with.
If you want to check out Zorin, or other popular Linux flavors, in your browser to see if you like them without having to install them on a VM/separate partition, try Distro Sea: https://distrosea.com/
There's also quite a few good reviews on Zorin on YouTube.
People should also note Zorin sells a "pro" version for around $50. I'm sure most people could achieve the same features the pro edition has without much trouble, but it also helps them with development costs and everything else.
https://zorin.com/os/pro/
DistroSea is amazing. I just tried it and it worked well. Though huge latency for me.
I get a `proxy detected` error whenever I try a vm on distrosea, I've tried disabling all content blockers and am not running a proxy of any kind.
Zorin is one of the best distros to recommend to noobs.
- Ubuntu based, so it has full compatibility with every .deb package that you find online
- Not actually Ubuntu, so it doesn't have that weird Canonical corporate push stuff (ads in terminal, etc.)
- Has a .exe hook preinstalled that asks you if you want to install Wine to run Windows apps
- Has a very Windows-like layout so it's instantly familiar (which is not uncommon, but Ubuntu certainly goes the other way)
And in place upgrades! It was a massive problem for years with Zorin (and still exists with other "user friendly" distros like Elementary), requiring a full system reinstall every time a new version released.
That being said, I still think this is a bit of a strange option when there's several Ubuntu flavors with more Windows-esque desktops, plus Linux Mint which offers a lot of these benefits with a much larger userbase and therefore better support (though Zorin is more "modern" looking). Not a bad option but not one I'd think to recommend often.
elementary supports upgrades since OS 8
https://blog.elementary.io/os-8-available-now/#:~:text=In%20...
That's about normal system updates. Upgrading between versions appears to still require a full reinstall: https://github.com/elementary/os/wiki/Release-Upgrades
Also, strange to move those into settings IMO.
I've not used ubuntu for some time, but
- Ubuntu based, so it has full compatibility with every .deb package that you find online
I don't think that .deb files are universally portable.
They are not universally portable, but if your running an Ubuntu derived system, most debs can be installed jus fine. Thats not because deb is so compatible,but because virtually everything assumes Ubuntu.
You need the .deb files to match your architecture and to have the necessary dependencies available, but for programs like Google Chrome, Discord, and VSCode, those dependencies seem to come down to "any recent version of glibc and openssl" and the .debs themselves are available for multiple architectures.
You're not going to be installing random Debian packages from the Debian FTP server, but for most proprietary software that resorts to "install this .deb", it'll work most of the time, which beats many other distributions.
On the other hand, installing software this way is a great way for upgrades to the next major version to fail spectacularly halfway through, so I'm not so sure if it's a feature or not.
Interesting. Is it pretty polished or are there some rough edges?
I don't daily-drive it myself (openSUSE Tumbleweed user here) but in my experience it's pretty smooth and polished.
I daily-drive it because of the polish.
“Bundled with alternatives to over $5,000 of professional software”
That sounds spammy and misleading to me. I’m assuming they’re just including open source alternatives and assuming the same value as commercial offerings.
>Zorin OS is built on the same Open Source software that powers the New York Stock Exchange and computers on the International Space Station.
>Thanks to the advanced security features of Linux, Zorin OS is resistant to PC viruses and malware
The whole landing page is full of those statements. It seems like they are targeting a demographics with low tech literacy, but I don't know how productive those statements are really.
> It seems like they are targeting a demographics with low tech literacy
True, and often overlooked in the world of Linux.
> but I don't know how productive those statements are really.
What it really means is that it comes with 20GB of so of preinstalled Flatpak apps for a whole bunch of use cases: graphic art, sound and music production, video and podcast editing, live streaming, etc.
Stuff you need domain-specific knowledge to find and install on Linux, and which on Windows costs real money and probably will get you a tonne of spyware, ad banners etc.
Nothing vastly demanding if you have the knowledge.
Rather than giving you an app store and leaving you to it to find it, learn it, navigate it, and find the apps you need and avoid anything dodgy, they take a whole catalogue of premium big-name FOSS apps and preload the lot.
It's big, and when I reviewed it, it filled my VM and then a real disk partition -- but in real life, you nuke Windows and dedicate a laptop to this, and then it's fine.
My most recent review:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/03/zorin_os_173/
My first:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/02/zorin_os_162/
It's simultaneously too much and too little. If the reader is genuinely a tech layperson, eg, someone who grew up on iPad and nothing else, then "open source" and "Linux" are just confusing filler words and a better statement would be
"Zorin OS is built from the same software that powers the New York Stock Exchange and computers on the International Space Station.
Thanks to its advanced security features, Zorin OS is resistant to PC viruses and malware."
The root is that the writers are pushing Linux, and writing through that lens, instead of internalizing the ur-problem that the readers have of "needing to get off Windows" (for whatever reason) and writing content that addresses that.
And I say this as a fan of Zorin.
I think the market they're targeting here makes no sense whatsoever. What cross section of people are both:
1. A tech layperson, and ...
2. In the market for downloading an OS?
Normal people buy computers and use OS that is installed on them.
It would probably make more sense to be targeting OEMs or something.
Commented this above, but I've had freinds and family ask about alternatives to windows lately because of privacy concerns or just being unhappy with it. I've been sending them the link to the ZorinOS page, and it's been popular with them. It convinced my dad to try Zorin on a new laptop they were buying, and he's been happy with it.
I would think if somebody could figure out how to install an OS just being given a link to that page, they're probably savvy enough that they could figure out how to use something like Ubuntu. But really, in your case, the marketing copy on their site isn't really doing much, your family got there because of the word-of-mouth reference.
If somebody is navigating to a website for an OS, they already have some sort of clue that a new OS would be solving their problem, which indicates that they do have some level of understanding beyond what most people would. Really the average computer user today doesn't know that an OS is a separable part of their computer... most people think of computers as "Mac computers", or "Windows computers".
In the case of my dad's computer, I installed Zorin for him. However the website itself convinced him that Zorin was what he wanted instead of windows.
Those two statements rubbed me the wrong way (more than the $5000 statement). Reminds me of military-grade encryption, etc. Completely void of any meaning, but sounds great to laypeople.
My father has gotten distrustful of windows, and wanted an alternative. I sent him a link to the Zorin home page, and it convinced him to try it out on a new laptop they were buying (I installed it for them). They've been quite happy with it, and I expect they'll want to swap over their other PC as well.
So it seems to me that this homepage was very successful, at least in this case of a linux user being able to recommend it to a non-techie.
But for many, they wouldn't even know this was possible. Yes, when you look into it it will be all the usual software, but 95% of people don't even know there is a world beyond windows and macOS, so that might be something that gets them to look for a couple of minutes and consider they might be able to use this.
But I get what you're saying.
I would add - I don't mind them describing it like that, the questionable part is how the advertising heavily implies that to get access to that software you have to buy the "Pro" version. The software is of course free and available to install on the "non-pro" version, it just doesn't get installed during installation, and they're definitely betting on people not knowing this detail and buying "Pro" to get the listed software.
You also get support with the Pro version.
Doesn't sound misleading to me. I read "$5,000 of professional software" as paid-for software that would have cost $5,000.
So clearly it is misleading, because what they mean is definitely along the lines of "we include GIMP while Photoshop costs $999".
I don't think that's misleading. There are a lot of people out there who aren't aware that free software exists that provides a lot of the functionality of software that costs $999. They clearly say "alternatives to".
I was trying to make a point about how funny the parent post was, saying it isn't misleading while misunderstanding it and thinking that it means "paid-for software that would have cost $5,000". But perhapes I didn't understand the comment itself.
I personally think the messaging is fine, but the above comment was a clear example that some people could get it wrong.
But gimp doesn't provide the functionality of software that costs $999. That's why it's misleading. It's probably more like Affinity Photo which is £68.
Whole Affinity pack is 10% of Photoshop while providing more functionality (just Affinity Designer handles vectors like Illustrator while edits pixels as well).
Gimp finally has non-destructive editing, so is almost in same category as those two. And Krita is good for pixels as well.
Which, incidentally, is the software they compare their offering to. The only Adobe software they mention in the comparison is Adobe Premier Pro.
How is it misleading when the sentence includes the word "alternative" from the boot? Are you misreading it and blaming the author?
What's misleading about that? Did you miss the words "alternatives to" in the statement?
I think that's mostly there to give people confidence that they'll have real, quality software available. A concern for new linux users is that they'll be missing software they need, that statement expresses that there will be a lot of software available, and that the quality is comparable to profession quality.
I wouldn't consider GIMP a real, professional-quality alternative to Photoshop (I say this as someone who uses GIMP on a daily basis)
They are specifically targeting enterprise customers, so corpo speak was going to be evident in their promo material.
How would you rephrase the sentiment?
GIMP, a $23/mo value, yours for $0/mo!
I would rather they didn't bundle anything at all lol
The lite install doesn't bundle anything.
So just the kernel?
No, I mean, like all that crap https://apps.gnome.org/
The line's got to be drawn somewhere. I would think most people expect the OS to come with a clock and calculator
My only issue with this project is that, after navigating the webpage for a while, I can't see _any_ reference to open source software, and compliance with their licenses.
They should at least put a link anywhere in the webpage, where people can click and at least be redirected to their components.
I know compliance is about "you only provide it if asked for", but they could be a bit more proactive and _embrace_ that they are using FOSS, not merely try to sell it.
By the way: How does selling of the Pro version work with GPL? Or is it covered because they offer the Core version?
It depends what's included, but if it's only extra apps/better integration made in-house, those don't need to be open source
Also you can charge money for GPL software. If someone wants to pirate Zorin OS, that person seems outside their non-techie target audience
https://zorin.com/about/#source-code
The link is also in the middle of the home page.
I miss my early days of CS college and tinkering with distro installs and installs and so on. In fact it was so fulfilling that it felt like “cooking your own meal”. I never used Windows. So in last two decades my experience has been Linux distros to osx/macos. If it was not for the internet cafe computer+internet usage before college (had no other exposure to either, otherwise) my experience of Windows would have been absolutely ZERO which is what it is now.
I wish OEMs had made Linux distros first class citizens for their laptops and computers and I wish these distros also imagined “regular people” using their OS/software. I guess both never happening kinda kept nullifying each other. Maybes it’s too late now?
In fact there was a time (around a decade ago?) when the Linux based laptops had started becoming kinda “normal” — I remember buying a Linux Dell Vistro with Linux pre-installed from Dell, had helped a friend buy an XPS with linux pre-installed. We both haven’t touched anything other than a Mac in a really long time and last two times I had to buy a laptop I found zero Linux options (in India) — let alone “good” options.
PS. Oh, my favourite was always Elementary OS even though it was clearly in beta when I migrated to the macs. There was just something about that distro.
> I wish OEMs had made Linux distros first class citizens for their laptops and computers
What more are you waiting for? Pretty much the only holdout is Nvidia, and they don't really make great laptop chips anyways. Almost every x86 chipset with UEFI and ACPI supports Linux to some degree. At this point, if your chip isn't running Linux it's because you've made a concerted effort to prevent users from accessing the bootloader.
When people say 'first class citizen' I feel like it's always a moving goalpost. First it's 'working WiFi drivers' but Broadcom modems have been supported for a decade now. Then it's 'proper Wayland support' but even Nvidia has a working Wayland session now. So then the goalpost moves to 'but I want Wayland on XFCE' and the cycle starts anew. These days, the 'regular people' workload I see on most computers boils down to gaming and running Google Chrome. Linux does both of those fine; it's the culture that has to change before people accept it. Look at how successfully the Steam Deck penetrated the market.
"First class citizen" never moved that much other than Bluetooth being kind of a requirement now, since it's increasingly hard to find good headphones that use 1/8" jack.
Elementary's terminal emulator and the notification bell which rang every time my computer finished a bell is embedded in my brain. I learned how to program properly on that OS and enjoyed every minute of it.
first linux is just the kernel, you can't do much with only the kernel, you have to target a distro.
But which distro to target?, Ubuntu, Linux mint or fedora, or all of them. That would take a lot of effort to developing and validating (And no, we don't only validate the kernel, it's not enough).
I remember seeing this a few years ago. It certainly looked interesting, and maybe something I could convince my parents to use.
I've been so entrenched in Linux for the last two decades and have come to Stockholm-syndrome myself enough to genuinely like modern Gnome desktop, and Sway nowadays, so a part of me isn't completely sure why you'd want Windows on Linux, but of course I'm not the target audience for something like Zorin.
That said (and this is coming from a guy who is running Linux on the computer typing this and has spent a lot of time customizing Sway [1] and lots of other tinkering to the desktop), I'm skeptical of the claim that moving to Linux will be "faster". I haven't used Windows 11 yet at all, but for day-to-day desktop use I haven't really noticed Windows being slower than Linux. I haven't done benchmarks but I doubt the people running something like Zorin will either; it's all vibes based, and personally I don't really think that Linux feels faster than Windows, at least not Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10.
[1] https://github.com/Tombert/rs-swanbar
I used this (pro) for a few years. It is ok but it does not have any particular feature I found worth the cost of the upgrades.
I bought the current version back then. I dont remember the number so X. Less than a month later they released the new version X+1 and that was at €39 I believe for a discounted upgrade.
(numbers may not be 100% accurate it has been a while)
But they do have a free version and that is nice of them.
The full price is 48+tax, so 44+tax for the upgrade sounds wrong.
I personally use Mint/Ubuntu with XFCE which I found it to be the closest to my work habit and the closer to Windows (I use both Linux and Windows).
About ZorinOS Pro, I think it is too expensive. They are competing with Free Windows, Free MacOS, and Free Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch. That said, if it works for them, let them be. AS long as they respect the GPL/LGPL and contribute back, I don't see a problem.
I’m glad that there are distros catering towards less techy people. Linux needs this. But I take issue with selling open source projects that could otherwise be downloaded for free.
The $48 Pro version resells open source software (Blender is mentioned on their website) and slaps on a few themes. Even if legal, this just seems highly unethical.
They aren't selling a product (open-source software). They are selling a service - the effort to customise the distro and package it with free, useful softwares. Hopefully, they also donate some time and money back to those free, open-source softwares. Note also that GPL has never been hostile towards commercial software. In fact, with MySQL (before it was owned by Oracle), the FSF even endorsed MySQL's dual-license open-source business model.
> it is highly unethical to resell open source software produced by volunteers intending to make their work free.
Why? ZorinOS users can still download Blender for free if they don't pay for the mega-pack. You have to imagine that it's not very hard for Zorin to follow GPL guidelines ("here are your 13,000 source tarballs, good sir") with this business.
You also can't prove that any of these volunteers are against downstream repackaging of their work. If they were really ideologically against the idea of people being able to sell Free Software, then they probably wouldn't be putting time into a GPL project. Commercial redistribution of GPL software has been a thing since the 90s, with much larger pricetags than $48.
I still don't understand the conflation of free as in freedom with free as in free beer.
You reserve certain rights to the code, that's not to say no one gets paid for _putting in work_.
If anything these models are about as close to providing _some_ manner of income to upstream projects. If Zorin donates a portion back, that is.
Strongly disagree on the "unethical" part. Maintaining a distribution is a lot of work, and the infrastructure also costs money. Paying for the distribution of software is totally fine. You are not even forced to pay anyway.
Would it be less unethical to charge a $48 installation fee?
Because as far as I know, there's nothing stopping you from installing the free version of Zorin OS and then installing Blender, Krita, Inkscape, etc.
The Pro version has dedicated support and is meant for enterprise customers.
> But I take issue with selling open source projects that could otherwise be downloaded for free.
Why should they concern themselves with you taking issue? What I mean is what gives you the right to have an opinion on their conduct?
I disagree with them, I find selling free software to be a pretty solid and ethical way of funding free software, but why would they not have the right to have an opinion on this?
I certainly have strong opinions about many software vendors, who distribute proprietary software, often full of ads and tracking on top of that, why would I not have the right to find that strongly unethical?
Since it seems to be without any grounds that the other user is anonymously accusing named individuals of acting unethically, I wanted to ask what gives him that right?
If he has a real argument, let's look into it. If not, then he's slandering innocent people without any due and the question is then why in the world they should care about this persons opinion?
> the question is then why in the world they should care about this persons opinion?
Oh yeah, that's totally different. All we know if that this commenter finds the practice unethical and that's it. There's pretty much nothing one can do with this information without some further backing.
> he's slandering innocent people
That's a bit strong, they are just saying that it seems unethical. They find that maybe it's unethical. It's not less nuanced than that. Ethics is all about opinion anyway. We all have our own views on what's ethical and what's not so this can't be an objective statement from the start.
My computer lab with 20 computers working fine due to Zorin. Was fidning it difficult to run Ubuntu in these systems - 2 GB RAM, Intel dual core.
I know there's a place for distros like these, designed to be familiar to users of Windows or MacOS, but to me it shows Linux at its laziest: where exciting new ideas in system and UI design are skipped over, in favor of bad design ideas from 1995 (looking at you, Start menu). On MacOS and Windows you're stuck with whatever OS UI those respective corporations decide you get—the Apple menu, the Start menu, floating window management, and so on—and there's nothing inherently good about those paradigms; they mostly just exist for legacy reasons. On Linux, you have the freedom to customize everything, and to so it just seems sad that so much good development effort is going into building systems that value familiarity over innovation.
Put differently, I find it sad when user-friendliness is valued over user-centrism. Linux is full of software that is user-centric more than user-friendly: look at Vim, for instance, which is famously difficult to quit, yet is designed to be ergonomic and efficient in a way which puts the user first. The Vim philosophy (modal editing, ergonomic arrow keys, etc.) has even been extended to web browsers (Qutebrowser, for instance), and to window managers (i3, sway, etc.). These types of programs, in my opinion, are where Linux really shines.
Most people commenting here, however, describe this familiar/innovative or friendly/centric dichotomy in terms of user archetypes: "techie" and "normal" people. That feels unnecessarily essentialist, implying that "normal" people aren't curious enough to learn something unfamiliar, like a new style of user interface. But if we always assumed that, we'd never have had any innovative interfaces at all: mouse-driven desktop interfaces, smartphone touch screens, or any of it.
Of course, Linux distros are diverse enough to have something for everyone. I just think that conventional, familiar ones like this represent a missed opportunity.
> in favor of bad design ideas from 1995 (looking at you, Start menu)
For what it's worth, that's the point when your comment jumped the shark. I knew then that this was just a rant.
The Start menu was a _superb_ piece of design, as was Win95 in general. If nothing else, the existence proof of this is the sheer number of other desktops that imitate the design:
KDE; GNOME 1/2; MATE; Xfce; QNX Neutrino Photon; Inferno; OS/2 Warp 4; BeOS Tracker; Enlightenment; Moksha; XPde; Fvwm95; IceWM; JWM; Lumina; LXDE; LXQt; Cinnamon; GNOME Flashback; EDE; Budgie; UKUI; Deepin; Aura; FyneDesk.
I could probably find more, but 24 should do for now. Even combining forks, there are over 20.
You may not like it, and that's a legitimate view I am not arguing with, but billions of people use desktop interfaces modelled upon it, representing the combined work of thousands of developers, reimplementing it in dozens of languages.
> the existence proof of this is the sheer number of other desktops that imitate the design
That's where you're wrong. The desktop environments that imitate Win95 elements do it to provide something familiar for their users. The KDE team is not sitting around going, "you know what was designed really well? The Start Menu!" In fact, many of the desktop environments you mention (GNOME Flashback, Cinnamon) were a conservative reaction to the new GNOME 3 design which broke from the Windows aesthetic. The Wikipedia page for Cinnamon, for instance, says it aims to "follow traditional desktop metaphor conventions" and aims for a "gentle learning curve." They're explicitly choosing familiarity over innovation.
> The Start menu was a _superb_ piece of design
Not really. It achieves a reasonably clean look, but at the expense of excessively hierarchicalizing programs and documents. GNOME's Activities panel allows you to click "Activities" then click the program you want to run. Even better, you can just tap the Super key, type a letter or two of the program, and press enter. On Windows 95, I remember trying to launch a calculator, and clicking Start, then clicking Programs, then clicking Utilities, then clicking Calculator. In 1995, lots of people were complaining about the Start Menu, how clunky it was and how it slowed down common tasks. GNOME 3's approach is better, as is MacOS's Launchpad, as well as lots of other desktop launchers.
> billions of people use desktop interfaces modelled upon it, representing the combined work of thousands of developers, reimplementing it in dozens of languages.
The idea that pervasive ideas are somehow good, just because they're popular, is a well-known logical fallacy called Argumentum ad Populum. The Start Menu was never good. It was just popular. One does not follow from the other.
> Even better, you can just tap the Super key, type a letter or two of the program, and press enter.
Most DEs do that today, including KDE, Cinnamon, Xfce (at least in some config), and Windows itself (although that last one does to much including web searches when you do this).
The categories in the start menu have its advantages, that's how I discovered what program exists and does what as a child in a KDE based distro. I fail to see what's wrong with a start menu + this feature you are citing. It does discovery + efficience very well. Gnome 3's Android-like icon grid without categories (from what I recall and from the screenshots I see) seems awful for discoverability seems awful. If you don't know the icon or the name of the program you are looking, the icon grid seems awful (although I recognize keyword search should get you there, but keyword search + the categories that other DE provide seems more useful - and today, it's rare to have deep hierarchies like in win95)
I disagree on all points. I suspect that you lack historical context to this design, and may be too young to thoroughly grasp it. I have read that younger people (millennials and younger) tend not to think in hierarchies and find them complex and difficult.
Tell me, what pre-Windows 95 GUI designs are you familiar with? I don't mean know slightly, I mean know well.
I agree that it's important for user-centrism to be a focal point of Linux, however I am also happy that distributions like this exist, yes you do lose some of the _magic_ of Linux by replicating a workflow a user is already used to, however this is perfect as non-technical people simply just don't care about that and just want to check their emails, social media, do some shopping, research stuff and watch some content online. They don't need to learn user-centric workflows like Vim to do such a thing.
As a longtime Mac user, I kinda wish it had a start menu. So much useful stuff easily accessible. But also, none of those choices affect my productivity all that much.
As a longtime Mac user, just use Command-Space.
I'm both. (Mac and Windows since 1988, before Linux existed.) The point of the start menu is that you can search; the point of Spotlight is that the computer searches.
With Spotlight, you're telling the computer to run something you know is there, without bothering looking for it. You need to know it's there.
With a dedicated app launcher, such as say the macOS Launchpad, you can explore what apps are available to you. Once you know, you can quickly open it with cmd+space and 2-3 letters.
You can't open things that aren't there. You need to find what's available.
They are different tools for different purposes, which is why Launchpad is also there.
Exactly, except the problem with Launchpad is it's cumbersome and takes up the entire screen. I never use it, just have to know exactly what I'm looking for and use cmd-space.
> just have to know exactly what I'm looking for
And how do you acquire that knowledge? Browsing. Looking and reading, and remembering.
Mac OS X had no mechanism for this, but iOS does. iOS's Springboard launcher is lifted directly from the Dashboard in OS X "Tiger". Apple simplified it for the phone to only show apps. Then later they grafted it back in its simplified phone form -- Dashboard having been removed in the meantime.
Before that you had to browse the filesystem. To do that you need to know where to look.
That's how it worked on classic MacOS, and Windows 1 and 2, and DR-GEM, and AmigaOS, and RISC OS, and basically all other 1980s GUIs.
(Proprietary Unix left you with a terminal. Job done.)
The innovation in Windows 3 was having an app launcher program with groups. It was called Program Manager. It had groups, because it's quicker to look in the group related to what you want than in all apps. ProgMan was stolen from OS/2 1.1 by the way.
Win 95 had a further innovation that built on that. It shrank Program Manager down from a full-screen app to a single button, that opened up on a hierarchical list, and that list had icons in it because some people are more visual and recognise icons better than names.
Me, I'm a reader, I want words not pictures. Pictures waste my time and my screen space. That's why it's important to offer a choice. GNOME takes away choice. The GNOME devs have a Vision and you must use it. The KDE devs don't have a vision. They have nearly as many visions as developers, and they try to accommodate all of them.
Not everyone: just the devs. Examples:
* I use widescreens. We all use widescreens now. I want the title bars on the side, like in wm2, not on top. That's not an option.
* I liked BeOS. I think title bars should be tabbed, like in web browsers. That's not an option.
* I hate hamburger menus. I want menu bars. There is no global option for that. You can't have it.
* I hate CSD. I want a title bar I can middle-click to send behind all other windows, like KDE 1, 2, 3 and 4 did, as well as every other non-GNOME desktop. I also liked Windowblinds on classic MacOS: the ability to roll up windows into the title bar. Again, like in some older KDE versions. There's no option for that any more.
There is important choice, accommodating different needs and usage patterns, and there is cosmetic choice, merely affecting how things look but not the underlying mechanisms of how they work.
Supporting diversity of usage is more important than diversity of appearance.
Both the full desktops that natively support Wayland fail to do this.
Realistically you shouldn't need thousands of applications so remembering the names of the 20 or so apps I use isn't a big deal.
Good for you.
I've been doing tech support since 1988. I've seen many many PCs with hundreds of apps, some maybe heading into thousands, sometimes with custom hackery to get different versions running in parallel and stuff.
Yes this is a thing. It is common.
And the typical user does not know what an "app" is, or what OS they are using. I've lost count of the number of people that told me their computer was running Word or Office (not Windows), or who think they access the Web via Google because they don't know what a web browser is.
Here is some proof, in case you don't believe me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ
If you can name the 20 apps you use the most often, you are the elite of the elite, the top 1% of 1% of computer users.
Normal people are not like that. They don't know what they use or what it's called or what OS they run or what an "OS" is, and they outnumber us by approximately a million to one.
I used to work tech support as well... For this case if I was on a user machine and needed to browse for apps I would open Finder.app and navigate to /Applications, this is what I did even with Launchpad existing because it's more convenient to navigate and search as it's just a standard window instead of some full screen thing. This would mean I could continue reading documentation alongside the finder window.
> sometimes with custom hackery to get different versions running in parallel and stuff.
Most users just aren't doing this, they open up their Mac, install a few applications and then just use it as intended; they don't need to customise things and wouldn't care to spend the time even if it benefited them. If they are capable of implementing these custom hacks and things they are likely intelligent enough to navigate via Finder and Spotlight for almost all use cases.
> If you can name the 20 apps you use the most often, you are the elite of the elite, the top 1% of 1% of computer users.
I don't think so, most people I know whether that's friends or colleagues (some technical, some not) use maybe 3–5 apps:
Browser Word Processer Spreadsheets Notes Task Management (reminders, asana, jira or something) Music Player (some just use the browser)
people don't have 20+ applications to remember day in day out.
Hell even as a power user I only really use:
Terminal Browser IDE Creative Tools (Logic, Final Cut, Compressor, etc.) Notes Reminders Music Player
The only UNIXes that I consider ever caring for the whole experience as a full stack, for users and application developers alike, were Irix, Sun NeWS, Solaris, NeXTSTEP and its evolution as OS X.
Sure you can argue Linux distributions can also offer something similar, the problem is which flavours and for how long, which brings us to shipping the Linux kernel underneath Java and Web frameworks, as being the most successful approach thus far.
> the problem is which flavours
Whatever distro which is pre-installed on the computer you buy, or whatever your geek acquaintance picks, or whatever you pick as a geek yourself (any mainstream distro will do).
> for how long
The lifetime of the computer in all of the cases, or, in the last case, until you want to try out something else.
Seems decent in any case.
Worked very well for netbooks, with OEM specific distros.
It was a vision on what something like Android would be.
Not sure what's your point, netbooks like the eee PC are starting to become ancient history anyway.
When it comes to our current era, Dell, Lenovo and HP computers sold with Linux are fine, and there's KDE-related hardware that seem nice too [1] (at KDE they understood that it's important to be the default OS, so they are pushing towards this). system76 too I've heard. Obviously choice is more limited than for Windows (although macOS is doing well with limited choice too), more biased towards pro, but there are decent options. The installed distros are quite standard too, there's some customization but not more than what we see on Windows computers.
[1] https://kde.org/fr/hardware/
Being Ubuntu based, I really think Zorin should be combining efforts with Linux Mint. There is quite a bit of work duplicated here. IMO Mint is the prime project; I prefer an ideal form of the core OS to a facade of others. Mint's choices have, as a side-effect, made it rather familiar anyways.
They're both in Dublin, as well.
Clement Lefevbre is French, and Artyom and Kyrill Zorin are Ukrainian, although they grew up in Dublin. I met them and had lunch with them. They sound like it. :-)
The big difference is that Mint is free and runs on donations; the premium Zorin OS edition is paid-for and had paid support.
I can't see how the business models would combine. But, apart from that, I think you're right.
Both have an Xfce edition, and in Zorin's case, it's free.
Mint's flagship has a fork of GNOME 3 called Cinnamon. Zorin uses real upstream GNOME, but with pre-installed GNOME extensions to recreate a Windows-like desktop. Zorin sponsors Dash-to-Panel, and was involved in the original fork from Dash-to-Dock. It also uses Arc menu and a bunch of other extensions, and they're on Github, but they're not in the GNOME extensions store.
And there's also GNOME Flashback, which is a separate Windows-like desktop based on GNOME $Current tech, but maintained by the GNOME team.
There must be some way to combine these things and make a better experience with the combined efforts, but none of the three companies wants it.
And Mint should be combined with Pop OS?
But there's already a Zorin OS! Example footage here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=043WEs_6TAo
Just because you can charge for open source software, doesn't make it moral to do so. Concentrating our efforts on making Debian even easier to use seems much more in line with the ethics of the FOSS ecosystem.
It's a catchy name that I haven't seen in very many places. A few years back, I met a salesman named Zorin. I thought for a moment and realized that was the name of a Bond villain (played by Christopher Walken). I mentioned it to him, and he said that his mom had named him after the character.
The OS looks interesting, and may be appealing to non-power users who want more freedom and/or privacy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvxumh7ULx4
This looks like my favorite for installing on relative's PCs before the Windows 10 sunset - I'm just a bit worried about Dual Boot, I've heard some stories about hiccups there. Does anyone have comments about how Dual Boot works with Zorin today, or general experience with that use case?
For what it's worth, Windows 10 will sunset in two years. You can pay $30/year for security updates (or get updates for free by enabling Windows Backup or spending Microsoft Reward Points you earn by using Bing) and keep using Windows 10 until programs stop working, which will probably take a while with the current status.
My advice on dual booting Linux in general:
1. Resize the partition from Windows if you're going to install to the same disk
2. Do not use MBR mode to install anything. Windows updates will break your Grub bootloader, and Grub updates will break the Windows bootloader. Most PCs default to UEFI these days already, but it's always good to check
3. If at all possible, use the computer's UEFI OS dialog rather than chainloading Windows from the Linux bootloader. Kind of requires a user-friendly motherboard GUI, but if Bitlocker decides to turn itself on, you'll be struggling with recovery keys a lot less if you let both bootloaders just manage themselves.
4. If that's not possible or the motherboard OS selection sucks ass, and Bitlocker is enabled, write down the recovery key, boot through the Linux bootloader once (Windows will notice the boot process changed and prompt for a recovery key), and enter the recovery key. After a reboot, Bitlocker should unseal when booting from the Linux bootloader automatically, and now directly booting from the motherboard OS selection will require the recovery key.
5. If you're going to use a new disk, make sure to create a sufficiently large UEFI partition (>1GB, storage is cheap these days!) so bootloader/kernel updates don't break in the coming years.
6. Not really a dual booting issue, but if you're doing tech support for your relative, do yourself a favour and set up a tool like Timeshift (including automatic snapshots on updates, and if your configuration permits automatic integration into Grub). It'll offer system restore-like features, allowing you to revert the system to a known-good configuration in case an update breaks something. Timeshift itself works best on btrfs installs, but it'll also work in rsync mode on any file system, and other tools like it exist.
Great tips, especially the recovery keys. I wouldn't have thought of that, thank you. One question, some distros like Pop OS offer drive encryption as part of the installation process. Do you know whether that would affect the whole disk (and hence could replace Bitlocker) or only the partition it lives on?
Been dual booting for 2 years and I have distro hopped over 6 distros. Never had a hiccup. Ever
Bought their paid license to support the team. Got ChatGPT support. Sub-par, TBH, doesn't worth it at all.
Around once a year I look for a distro that works on a laptop w/fractional scaling and hibernate. I’ve already done that once this year, if Zorin can handle that then maybe 2026 will my personal year of the linux desktop
I’ve been looking for a better ecosystem than Apple. This looks like it.
Basically every linux marketing ever: a polished desktop theme that is familiar to windows users and works on old machines, also never mentioning this is a linux.
THE ROTATING CUBE IS BACK!!!! LFG!!!!
https://youtu.be/4QokOwvPxrE&t=120
I’m glad to see it. It really didn’t get much better than Desktop Cube back in the day.
I've installed Zorin for several elderly folks who were bewildered by the Windows 11 upgrade, and they all seem to like it.
Why has the spinning cubes / compiz demo remained a mainstay for desktop linux presentations for 20 years now?
about a decade ago Zorin OS got me into Linux.....Highly recommend it to any windows users that are tired of the nonsense.
nowadays I am a happy and competent debian user
I use arch btw
Without Pro, I cannot choose macOS style interface at all? I think that looks the best.
The macOS style looks very close to out-of-the-box Gnome from what I can tell.
There are free themes that will also look like macOS if going for the macOS look is your goal: https://forum.zorin.com/t/making-zorin-os-look-like-macos-bi...
Comes down to installing WhiteSur, a few fonts, and an icon pack.
Your link says: "You need to have Zorin OS Pro and the macOS style enabled."
At any rate, as techie, I could make it look like macOS, but I was thinking of installing it on family members' computers without much effort.
Look ma, an imperative linux distro, you can even pay for it.
can someone kindly explain to me how this is capable of running AAA steam games? is it running them natively or through some virtualization layer?
They mean through proton, which is Valve's compatibility layer based on wine. It was made for the arch-based steam deck but can be used on most (any?) distros. IME it works surprisingly well, although some games drop out when the anti-cheat gets updated, then might come back when proton updates.
https://help.zorin.com/docs/apps-games/play-games/#steam
I assume it's just using proton like the steam deck.
is Zorin Connect something that can be installed and used independently of Zorin OS? and does Zorin Connect depend on Gnome?
Is this the spiritual successor to Lindows?
Lindows became Linspire.
Because Microsoft sued over the name:
https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/micr...
Linspire was paid-for, and later introduced Freespire as the free community version.
https://practical-tech.com/2007/08/05/linspire-ceo-kevin-car...
Remarkably enough, it is still available. I reviewed the then-latest version in 2023.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/15/freespire-95-breezes-...
It's a successor in name only; the company acquired the Freespire and Xandros brands. The product, sadly, is unrelated. (I say "sadly" because it had a pretty good desktop based on KDE 2.x.)
But -- yes, you're right, it sort of is.
It`s open source?
Some components, like paid-for themes in the Pro version, aren't. But most of it is as open source as any Linux desktop.
Just another Linux distribution.
If it wants to be better than Google, Apple and Microsoft desktop offerings, needs to be available on random shopping mall stores, with the same adoption complexity as the competition.
[flagged]
Hopefully its powered with a 40W RTX 5060
cathode ray tube race theory!?!?