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this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2026
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I find it weird that I didn't hear about Zorin before it suddenly got big. Maybe it was advertised to normies, maybe Linux communities are just massive circlejerks that don't represent the userbase.
Just curious about how they came seemingly out of nowhere.
I heard about it about 2 years ago, either on here or reddit. A user recommended it, so I tried it out.
It's good, has a clean aesthetic and a simple switcher to alter how GNOME actually looks. Perfect for a new User to tryout the Windows Menu look, or more of a GNOME dash, or whatever the other two options were.
And they figured out funding: present a price, allow downloader to choose the price , or offer more, or type in 0.
Mainly I'm still waiting for their admin Grid product to manage multiple machines from a central location.
I also only heard about it very recently.
Honestly, it's cool. Hopefully it can bring in more users.
Their numbers are highly sus.
But if you've got a paid tier, it just makes business sense to make it sound like the next best thing.
Yeah it's like fedora or Ubuntu. But it feels (particularly from the other reply to my comment) to be the result of guerilla marketing
When I was doing web searches for distro research just before Win 10 EOL (and before Zorin exploded), Zorin was one of the top recommendations that I repeatedly saw from users in Linux communities when people asked for distro recommendations.
Zorin was also the top recommendation given to me by distrochooser.de.
So I'm not surprised that many people leaving Windows ended up there.
I made a short list of distros to try and Zorin was very buggy for me (possibly because they just did a major release at that time) and I don't like GNOME, so I ultimately ended up on CachyOS.
Yeah a lot of the weird new Debian based distros like popOS seem to have issues.
I guess you were looking for a windows looking UI though in surprised mint was suggested more (even if it has Qualcomm WiFi driver issues)
Feels like guerilla marketing, maybe I'll try and research down that rabbit hole one day.
I installed Zorin Lite on my dad's old computer back in 2022 because W10 wouldn't run properly. They've been around for a while and advertised themselves as having a very Windows like ux.
It's a perfectly serviceable OS, he has used it all these years without ever having to touch the terminal.