Gotta have to congratulate the folks over at Zorin OS for this succes. Mad props!
Though, I gotta wonder: Can we expect similar numbers for Linux Mint or Ubuntu? Or, has Zorin OS somehow won the post-W10 SEO-wars? And, if so, how?
They have UIs that look just like Windows out of the box. A lot of their marketing is to cater to Windows refugees as “we’re the easiest ones to get used to”.
They have better marketing and establishing user benefit, their next project is GRID which is supposed to be for an IT admin to mass deploy software,patches and policies from a dashboard, like you do with Windows. So they will gain credit with IT pros
I took time over the weekend to put Bazzite as my primary OS on both my desktop and ROG Ally. Not because it necessarily performs better but just because I’ve had enough of all the creepy AI shit that MS is doing.
How did you decide between that and Zorin?
I have used Zorin for the past year for gaming. It’s been mostly fine, but they are a bit slow to upgrade certain things in the interest of stability. Zorin is on a two year cycle for major releases, which can mean waiting awhile for certain package upgrades. This is probably for the best for non-gamers and regular users, but some games I wanted to play required the latest graphics driver, which in turn required some newer dependencies in the OS.
Lately, I’ve been kinda toying with the idea of switching to Bazzite because every time I tinker with the graphics driver in Zorin, I break it. Additionally, sometimes some random package upgrade breaks things. I eventually get it working, but it is never fun to login for the night planning to play with a friend and then need to instead fix an issue. I’m thinking Bazzite might be a bit more suited for my gaming use cases given that it’s their priority. I don’t know for sure though. I could really care less about the OS and have no ego about doing things myself. Fuck Windows, but beyond that, I just want a zero maintenance OS that lets me game.
I’m sure Zorin is solid. I went with Bazzite since it does a lot for gaming out of the box and makes updates pretty easy. I have another Laptop with PopOS on it and have really enjoyed that as well. Again - pretty straight-forward experience if you are coming from Windows.
Lots of comments suggesting Zorin is for beginners who don’t know Linux and just want something like Windows. I’d just like to say that I have been using Linux as my daily driver for over 20 years now. I’ve done a lot of distro hopping, everything from Puppy and DSL to Garuda and Ubuntu.
Zorin is a great OS for people who like understandable work flows and a polished interface. Lots of excellent options in Linux land, but even with all my years of experience I’m quite happy to settle in with Zorin.
A Linux distro can be “for beginners” because it includes reasonable defaults and tools that make it easier to use. But it will never really be “only” for beginners.
Every Linux distro uses basically the same kernel. They all offer a console to access the command line. So, as an expert, what can I not do in basically any version of Linux?
With things like Distrobox, I can even get any other version of Linux on my version of Linux.
I could be installing applications from the AUR 15 minutes after installing ZorinOS. I could be running containers, compiling code, deploying cloud infrastructure, doing offensive cybersecurity, playing games in Steam, transcoding video, or running AI agents the console. What exactly can I not do on Zorin that need an “expert” distro for?
People are a bit too elitist sometimes.
Not a Zorin user by the way.
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Lindows died to soon
It still exists as Linspire
Is zorin-os that good? I don’t really like its model of bundling a whole lot of free software together and then charging money for it.
Although you can just get the free version.
I personally like Zorin better than Mint. Mint is very dated looking, while Zorin feels more in line with a modern OS. They also try to create an easy experience for non-techie people to use Linux. They need some model to keep themselves going though. The money for pro also unlocks some features they’ve added to the OS and the free software is still free, they just make it easy to acquire it for non-techie people who don’t want to spend time trying to do their own research, or don’t know how to.
It is Ubuntu with some attention to the UI and UX, and just like Ubuntu the “pro” version has a price. Which you pay a premium to have things preinstalled.
The Zorin prices are donations to help pay the distro maintainers. You can choose 0 dollars, or atleast you used to be able to
it’s great for anybody that doesn’t need it for gaming. that LTS packages always gets painfully stale for non-steam
I never heard of zorin. I went to mint. I originally wanted a more hardcore distro but I decided to save the remaining bit of my sanity for later.
So, they know it’s only windows users that downloads it? Interesting - their version 17 must have sucked so much that people switched back, and now they give it another go?
I still have two more laptops to install Linux on, one will have Linux mint and the gaming one , I will keep having windows as it still offers 10-20 % better performance while gaming than any Linux os.
Which games did you see such performance differences in? Usually it’s the exact same (with a, let’s say, 3% margin of error) or slightly better on Linux.
I have only tried two games yet, schedule 1 and cs2, but read the comment I left to the other guy. I have explained there more. Also, I have done digging and it appears Nvidia just has shit drivers support for their cards on Linux and the open source ones are buggy on new rtx cards.