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?
Well Zorin is ubuntu based, so i feel like that’s a win for Ubuntu (and debian)
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”.
I’m not to familiar with zorin, and I don’t see it recommended often. What’s the deal? Any criticisms of it? Especially for new users?
Tried it when I was starting out. But I may have read somewhere that it uses telemetry. So uninstalled later.
Oh, that’s why Windows users install it then
It only recieves major updates every two years, which means it gets outdated over time. The themes included are great for beginners though.
I saw a comment stating that it charges 45$ for Zorin OS Pro, which is basically the normal OS but with some open-source software installed on it (Blender, Kdenlive, Audacity, etc.)
That must be what I saw before and decided against it.
Yeah, you always hear Mint
640k780k ought to be enough for anybody…Lindows died to soon
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.
for non-techie users that want to switch it’s great. Yes the updates are slow and few/far between but I mean if you go the paid route you get tech support and a few other software packages/themes.
I think for people who just want to keep older machines going and simply want to do work and browse/stream it’s fine. beyond that? good luck. I’ve heard that upgrading it is worse than Ubuntu and it’s based on Ubuntu so…
But Zorin has pretty good PR so that’s what’s going for them. Honestly though if you want a new user on linux that isn’t comfortable with it just yet I feel there are better options that “just work” like Bazzite or Mint.
Zorin is less about it just works and more that its feel is closer to windows for people looking to switch but arent ready to dive head first into unfamiliar waters. I used Zorin at my first distro for about a year as I got comfortable then just switched to Ubuntu and installed dash to panel and arc menu myself. It was a good OS for getting used to things
ZorinOS is a decent stepping stone for those coming from windows. It was my first Linux daily driver when I made the switch. It got me comfortable enough with Linux to dive in and start learning before I started distro hopping. I ended up on Mint and now just recommend that, but Zorin got me over the hump to become a full time Linux user.
Might be fun to make a live USB and see how much it’s changed in the last ten years. I’ve got a 4 day weekend coming up… might have to try that.
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.
in early 2000s there was a project written in pascal that was called xpde.
it was a desktop environment that was replicating everything in xp, control panel, file manager, device manager, desktop, everything.
i don’t know how it got closed/discontinued. was it a legal issue or developers ran out of steam.
Is that headline number for the free or paid for version? I couldn’t tell from the article.
Looks like all downloads are direct from them, so it’s much harder for distros using torrents to know their install base, but I suspect they’re not much different.
I’ve seen increased activity with the Arch, Mint & Raspios torrents that I seed - although I don’t have cold figures to say how much by.
Why would someone get a free OS from anywhere other than the developer website?
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.
as it still offers 10-20 % better performance while gaming than any Linux os.
Maybe we’re playing different games, but this has not been my experience
I actually installed zorin os pro yesterday and tested on simple games like schedule 1 and cs2… And in fact ,the games performance dropped significantly. Especially for a game like schedule 1 that I had no problem max preset on 2k at 80-100 FPS… now it’s barely running at 30 FPS in middle of the Forrest on the same settings which is mental difference and I even have to use over clock on my legion.
So far, not that good, if I be honest. Also ran into second screen support problems, bios problems and in general the os seems to bug out sometimes.
I swapped the auto assigned drivers for GPU to prioritary tested ones for my GPU and the performance didn’t really increase, but it did fix my second screen detection issue albeit now some of the settings disappeared.
Linux mint on the other hand is 😎, but I don’t use them for the same purpose as I wanted to use zorin os pro.
Overall, it feels like it is definitely more sluggish and bug prone os compared to windows. I am happy with the sealed os and no more windows ai crap push, despite I had modded windows installed… but the performance in games is horrendous.
Edit.
Should probably add that my CPU usage is never higher than 15% and my ram is ddr5 5600mhz of 32gb, which is sufficient so only bottle neck right now is GPU which i didn’t have as much problems on windows as I have on zorin os pro.
Yes, the sampled games are only two, but it paints a good picture to me how much better performance was. Also I can’t even use frame gen 4 anymore, as zorin just doesn’t support it. Which sucks, even tho I would ever use it for a few games only.
I have no idea about zorinOS. Try a gaming focused distro like CachyOS or Bazzite to likely get better results.
I’ve never used Zorin, so I can’t tell you what the problems are caused by. I’d just recommend using a more mainstream and polished distro for gaming. Personally I’ve been using Fedora for a while and every game I try performs great. Can’t really compare to Windows anymore as it’s been a few years since the last time I used it on my hardware.
Generally, Nvidia drivers are absolutely horrendous on Linux. However, there are distros that make installing the right ones extremely easy or even skip that part entirely. You can try Pop!_OS and select the Nvidia ISO or Manjaro, which I believe had an installer for Nvidia drivers.
For specific games, I recommend checking out their respective ProtonDB pages. For me all games work out of the box and I never need any tweaks. Though it’s a good place in case you run into any. Some games like Civilization VI have disastrous native Linux ports, so you need to manually change to Proton in the game’s properties on Steam. I don’t think it’s the case for CS2, since Valve’s games usually have great native Linux support.
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.
