That “780,000 Windows users” number is just made up for the title as clickbait.
That number is never mentioned in the original blog post.
All they said is they have a million downloads and “over 78% of these downloads came from Windows”. At no fucking point did they imply that means 780k unique users. There’s no reason to assume that everyone who downloaded the ISO actually went on to install it.
They also want $48 for their Pro version which comes with a “professional-grade creative suite” consisting of… GIMP, Blender, Inkscape, Kdenlive, and… Audacity (?), going off the screenshots they show:
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They’re shamelessly reselling free software as some sort of comprehensive package, and it’s not even their own distro. They’re just piggybacking on Ubuntu.
And their premium support only covers… installation?
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But hey, they support this edition with updates until 2029!
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Of course, pay no attention to the coincidence that the Ubuntu LTS version it’s based on also hits end-of-life around then:
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So I’m not really sure what you’re actually getting out of this purchase besides some extra themes and some really formulaic desktop wallpapers, and a couple proprietary apps. They say they “contribute to upstream Open Source projects” but offer zero evidence; their site doesn’t even have any Github/Gitlab links.
Its rare to see someone with brain in here
Zorin pro was the main reason I never stuck with Zorin OS however while they heavily advertise that the price is for the software. I think the real cost comes with “installation support”.
For many first time users, having support help with an install is a necessity and they will pay for it. See Geek Squad as an excellent example.
Plus having a preconfigured Linux experience is good for these users.
Nice perspective. I had a wtf moment reading they charge for Gimp etc, but I imagine some casual PC users installing linux would rather pays for the convenience than troubleshoots.
I am conflicted about Zorin, they are selling something using free software… but somehow, maybe marketing i am not sure… they are able to get people on Linux that never did before. So you know, seeing people ditching Windows for Linux might be the first step… maybe someone start with Zorin, get comfortable and jump to something else.
You’re forgetting what “regular” people are like. /S
I guarantee there are PLENTY of people jumping the commercial ship to try Linux of many flavors
I’m not saying there’s no people trying it, or that the actual number is negligible. I’m just saying I highly fucking doubt that 780,000 people have actually installed Zorin OS in the last month.
I’m far more bothered by them making Brave the built-in default browser, than I am by them charging for themes & tech support.
Fuh door uh!
Fuh door uh!
Fuh door uh!
Deb-Ian, Deb-Ian!
I think they broke up.
RIP Ian Murdock.
Pretty sure 80% of them are just people distro hopping, we know the Linux community 😂
Maybe, but those 780k users have plenty of good reasons to choose Linux over Windows 11. It’s all about personal preference and what works best for them.
Wasn’t criticizing the switch. I’m all on Linux as well, it’s just that’s it’s probably a misleading number
It’s because you can in Linux.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should!
Can’t wait for the “FOSS enables the bad guys to download 2 marijuanas” headlines from MSM.
My cousin downloaded Linux and died from injecting 3 Marijuana’s at once.
It was Arch btw.
Pff, amateurs. I can download 8 marijuanas simultaneously.
Dude, you have a serious problem, man. That’s way too much marijuanas.
I can haz a torrent of marijuanas.
Glad to be a statistic
Don’t be so gloomy! You’re an individual number too! 😜
True that. There are many Toms, but only one newLinuxUserWindows11Vagabond_578428
I know some who went to Linux and a few who moved to Mac. But no one is seeing Win11 and saying “oh man, I gotta get in on that”.
I jumped in to the Win11 beta and really liked it, they finally got most of the control panel into the new settings architecture and I never once had to dig deep into things to adjust something small, a lot of stuff that took finagling just worked.
And now I fucking hate it. The release version is jammed so full of bullshit features and useless AI junk that it is an active hindrance to whatever I’m trying to do. And more and more stupid fucking bugs bubble up in to the desktop and never get addressed, all while I get pop up after pop up urging me to try some bullshit new feature.
I already had one foot into Linux with my desktop but kept this because it was a Surface and nice at some point, but my next buy has to be a Linux 2-in-1, I can’t deal with Microsoft’s horseshit any longer.
I do want to emphasize that for the moments that it was unadulterated by rent-seeking, the new Win11 actually was kinda great.
In case you weren’t aware there’s an ongoing project adding Surface hardware support to Linux kernel. It’s in a pretty mature state, with most of the features already implemented and working (here is a full breakdown per device). I’ve been using it on my SP6 for a few years with zero issues.
It might be worth a look until you get to buying new hardware.
Thank you for this. I haven’t figured out what to do with my Surface yet, but this sounds promising.
Posting from a Surface Go 2 running Debian Trixie with Gnome+Phosh. Everything except the webcam just works on the stock kernel (for webcam support you need the patched Surface kernel). Vanilla Gnome is fine, too, if you use a hardware keyboard. I run Phosh because the onsceen keyboard is much better than Gnome’s.
I finally committed to the switch last weekend. My desktop PC was the last holdout still on Windows in my fleet, because of Adobe Lightroom. I decided to just force myself to learn Darktable, and nuked the Win 11 install and replaced it with Fedora 43.
Fun side note, some of my games run way better than they did on Windows, despite not having native Linux builds. lol.
My bottles borked my battle.net install somehow so instead of tackling the issue I’ll put it off for months/years and continue dual booting
everyone goes through that phase. logs often help a lot, and you will start to get a feel for what may be wrong like you did on windows. once some things become second nature you will stop needing windows altogether. meanwhile, friction means you are learning.
i usually favor lutris for gaming anyway, it’s better at keeping everything together and updated ime. bottles tends to lag behind a bit by default which is not ideal for games atm.
I tried Lutris before and it would constantly stop installing and freeze up… and when I let it set up in the default directory it will install and then when I launch bnet it doesn’t show any games at all… anddd when it inevitably decides to force quit out of bnet and I click stop on lutris I get “sequence item 0: expected str instance, int found” … also constantly slowing the fuck out of my mouse/computer… I think I fucked my install up when I initially set up mint… might just wipe and start over again…
huh. i don’t think you did anything wrong with mint.
did you try the flatpak or deb version of lutris? was it recent? old versions were hit and miss for me too.
Flatpak, I’m pretty sure that’s what the software manager installs right? I tried again today and it gave me the same shit. I do want to keep trying to get it to work though if you have any ideas!
Bruh ain’t no way people are choosing Zorin OS over all the available options.
If this is a result of people searching “best windows like distro”, they’re profiting off of a windows theme for GNOME, not even a full DE.
You can achieve the same thing with zero effort on any distro because DEs and themes aren’t tied to a distro.
You can achieve the same thing with zero effort on any distro because DEs and themes aren’t tied to a distro
No, YOU can. But for the average Windows user this is far from “zero effort”. Just the fact that Zorin OS will automatically run Windows executables through wine without the user having to set it up is a huge deal for people coming from Windows who want their PC to “just work” without fiddling around
Zorin needs your email and payment
No, it doesn’t.
https://help.zorin.com/docs/purchasing-zorin-os-pro/payment-methods/
For extra apps and some layouts
So it doesn’t then. Cool.
I am a macOS user for work and had windows mostly for games on my personal computer, when I got a new laptop last year it came with win 11… it was so annoying to need to skip literally ads for Microsoft services… that even being my “leisure” computer… I spent the time getting Linux Mint, deal with Nvidia drivers on Linux just to have steam there
The games I am playing recently are working great on Linux and my computer feels faster now.
This particular laptop had a problem with WiFi drivers and Nvidia drivers, but getting past this first setup, I must say Linux Destop is easier and fast to use.
I would bet money the fanspeed also got much quieter.
Yes, and comparing resources it issues much less CPU while “idle”
Everytime people say there is a problem with nvidia driver, what kind of problem do people have? I am running nvidia drivers on two different machines on arch linux. It was just
pacman -Syu nvidiaand thing just workOn my laptop, I was using the tool available on Mint to find ans install drivers and after I reboot I was losing the WiFi drivers
This laptop did not have an Ethernet port, so I needed to re-install the OS and try again
I just bought a machine with an NVIDIA card which I am going to install Mint on. Do you have any advice?
(I had planned to get an AMD GPU, but was unable to for various reasons.)
Do all updates first, save a snapshot of the system, than install the latest Nvidia driver.
For me, installing Nvidia drivers before the system update was the issue
I keep hearing about ads on computers, smart tvs, fridges and shit, is that solely an american thing? I’m in Europe and never get any of that shit. Sure, Microsoft will tell me at installation that they’d like to “personalize” some adds for me, but I have never actually had a single one. Did the EU block them or something?
You definitely get more in the US, but Europe isn’t free from ads.
Windows still shoves OneDrive, office, and other things in your face in Europe. They still have featured news stories and the like. They still have recommendations in the start menu and such.
These are all ads, though we’ve been conditioned into thinking MS plastering OneDrive and OneDrive recommendations all over their OS isn’t advertising. It very much is.
If you have an Android TV in Europe, 1/3 of the home screen by default is an ad banner, just like in the US. Etc.
We are not free from ads. We just have it slightly better than the US.
It might be the version of Windows 11 you have installed, too. Enterprise has no ads (or can be configured not to have ads, at least). Same for Professional, I think?
You can also use a post-install “Playbook” to rip all the adware and spyware out of Windows. I used ReviOS in my Windows 11 VM and it works well for me, but I’m guessing that’s not what you’ve done since you’d know about it, lol.
I’m super happy with my switch to CachyOS. Canadian laws roughly mirror US laws, so it’s a breath of fresh air to not need to deal with Microsoft’s bullshit (well, outside of the VM I need for work, anyway.)
You can also use a post-install “Playbook” to rip all the adware and spyware out of Windows
Does that actually persist across forced updates? I know they’ve been known to re-install things on updates before.
Zorin would t be my first choice. But happy to see those numbers.
I’m happy to see people enter as a gateway. Ubuntu has, and still does, serve that purpose as well.
I switched from Windows 10 to Mint. While there is a steep learning curve with basic things like adding an icons to the menu, I’m wishing I made the move earlier. There is a noticeable performance improvement with Stable Diffusion.
I downloaded Mint last week and started the installation but got cold feet when it came to drive formatting. I still want to keep my win10 operational in case I won’t be able to run something on Linux.
I never actually used Linux before… I installed it 3 times before and always quickly went back to windows due to some compatibility or driver issues, but…
<Rant mode=“venting”> I am NOT switching to win11… It’s enough that I am forced to use it at work. That system is so fuckin stupid… They took a lot of minor elements and just made each of them worse… I get that the sales department told you to shove OneDrive and Copilot everywhere, it’s stupid and annoying but I get it, it’s just plain old greed, but why can’t the Calendar show the whole month and don’t work on the second monitor?!? (Are you planning to add it as a paid subscription later?!?) </Rant>
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Just add a new partition and dual boot, it is pretty easy.
Also I do not recommend Mint for Windows users, because the officially supported UX layers are more apple-esque. Use a distro that has KDE support baked in. Adding KDE to Mint is easy but may not be for people switching.
For that reason, I recommend going with distros with KDE Plasma by default. Kubuntu or KDE neon.
Why KDE? It feels like where Windows should have gone. It’s like the glory days of Windows (windows 2000, etc) in the modern age. It is a drastic upgrade from Windows with more freedom than you ever had.
Mint has the Cinnamon desktop environment which isn’t that different from Windows/KDE. You’re probably thinking of Gnome?
Cinnamon, to me, is an in-between, more like modern Windows, which moved in a more macos direction. KDE is like golden age Windows. Gnome is like macos.
When I used Mint (maybe 10 years ago now?), I had all kinds of problems with Cinnamon. KDE was like magic and I always use it now. Perhaps things have changed but we can only make recommendations based on our experiences and knowledge.
Aye, Cinnamon i’d say is pretty Windows like now (taskbar, start menu and tray) but definitely not as good as KDE. The average user would be happy with either I think.
I’m on Cinnamon for my first linux OS, it feels pretty Windows to me.
I’m glad to hear that, thank you for sharing.
It sounds like Windows users have a lot more options now, which is a good thing.
