I think the toughest thing for me has been watching my former coworkers on Windows transform from technology loving builders into depressed cynics. Like these were some of the most brilliant people I knew and now they struggle to get out of bed.

> from a core of fantastic engineers surrounding by marketing/sales, to the org's direction being set by marketing/sales UX be damned.

> MacOS

I think macos is on the same path.

Apple refined the MacBook formula to a perfection and the hardware division made the best of it. But outside of the processor, what is the last significant leap forward that involved brilliant engineers that you can think of ?

One could argue that nothing should change, but that's a lot of missed opportunies (I personally wanted a response to the Surface Pro, and figured out it won't come anytime soon) and we also know that's not how it goes. If there's no significant progress there will be change for the sake of change (coughLiquid Glasscough)

Dave Plummer, retired Microsoft engineer from the early days, made a video on this 2 weeks ago:

> Windows "SUCKS": How I'd Fix it by a retired Microsoft Windows engineer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTpA5jt1g60

Mac users with longer tenure are also complaining the rot is also creeping through MacOS, especially with Tahoe.

I have mostly kept to linux and macos since 2008, so I was shocked when I could still find the old XP style control panels in windows when I tried it a little about 2 years ago

Win11 is mostly written by AI now and it's pretty obvious.

Microsoft's products have always been just good/cheap enough to gain enough market share to squeeze out others

I fired up my 10yrs old windows 7 PC for the first time in forever and was appalled at how snappy and quick the OS was compared to my same spec win10 PC. As a career primarily-microsoft-shop engineer I'm done with windows for personal use. I'll never forgive the for wasting everyones time with this garbage. Meanwhile I constantly find bugs from before 2002 that are still in windows10. Windows honestly made me slowly hate all computers.

The only piece of technology in my life that does exactly what it's supposed to do are my keyboards where I make the firmware. Everything else is pop up ridden dogshit

You mean the m3 MacBook Air?

A big concern I have for the industry is what happens as people who truly understand how this stuff works age out. Unfortunately we seem to have stopped replacing them.

Part of the issue is that computers today require no deep knowledge to use, unlike first or second generation PCs that genX and millennials grew up with. So you’re not getting as many people with this knowledge.

Just as significant I think is the prevalence of lucrative work higher up the stack. Why learn deep system internals when slinging JS and wiring together APIs pays as much or more.

> arly when they made unpopular choices, but for technically correct reasons, like UAC or forcing vendors to rewrite their drivers into userland or using a safer driver model

Also UEFI and TPM requirements. And i don't even use Windows.

Going to paste a recent rant of mine about windows ux. The thread sank so i don't think anyone saw it and i don't want to write a new comment discussing things i hate about windows.

>It's worth pointing out what a hideous cludge lots of Win10 ui is. I remember some ui expert complaining how there are half a dozen (maybe more, i don't remember) completely different ui interfaces. The most prominent ones of course is that horrible rectangle thing that's meant to be the start menu. Windows 11 didn't do a worse job, that would be almost impossible, but it's not much better. Then there was openly breaking functionality and discoverability by having a settings app as well as the old control panel, which is an absolute abomination. The manager app probably looked old fashioned on Windows xp.

> All of that was ok, because Win10 looks and feels quite nice overall and was a significant upgrade compared to 7. Win11 has none of that saving grace. They needed to fix the many disasters of Win10, not introduce new ones.

I will add that the single feature i hate the most about Win10 when it dropped the previous useful start menu and adopting the horrible rectangle thing. The main function of it changed from helping you navigate windows to serving up ads for M$ products. No, i'm not interested in Xbox, if i want to buy your office suite i will. Don't show me a non functioning tile to remind me i don't have it.

Love the most commit titled 'Release 1.33.4' that's actually just changing a log export file from `kdeconnect-log.txt` to `zorin-connect-log.txt` : https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-connect-android/commit/de6d...

Presumably because a good portion of the target audience are less technical users, and there's no reason to be throwing extra (ex-)initialisms at them. "Zorin Connect" is clearly something that will connect my Zorin OS to something. "KDE Connect" is something that might perhaps connect me to a "KDE", but what's a "KDE" anyway and why would I ever need to connect to it?

Forking it makes it easier to convince your flock of sheep that you must pay for GPL software. It also gives them a lot of opportunity to inject their own happy accidents into there.

Zorin OS' main pitch is the design work they put into it to make it look like Windows or macOS. As far as I can tell they wrote zero new software (the taskbar is a forked GNOME extension, and the Zorin Connect app is a forked KDE Connect).

So, its not surprising they made an effort to make a nice looking webpage, design work is basically the only thing they are doing.

That has not been the case for quite a long time now. Lots of distros still have websites that look like a wiki, see Arch. But in their case the Arch wiki is one of the best wikis ever existed for what it covers.

If you look at modern yet established distros, I struggle to find the outliers that don't have professional looking, slick web pages. See all the *buntus, Fedora, Elementary OS, Cachy OS, Bazzite, Endeavour, Manjaro, Linux Mint, and so forth.

I think a project's web page design conveys a lot about the philosophies of the project itself. My first thought when the page loaded was "Chinese knockoff of Windows 11" - it looks like a product.

Update: It is a product. To get themes/configurations more palatable to former Windows and Mac users, you need to pay $48 https://zorin.com/os/pro/

If you know what a distro is, and that distro is most trustworthy when the website looks unappealing, chances are you don't need to be convinced of benefits of Linux!

Looks pretty generic to me, in line with modern trends of spaced out, extra padded, pale tones.

What it does well compared to websites of the same bunch is that it has good contrast for text. Not the obnoxious light gray on white.

It isn't weird. They also don't seem to provide any proper screenshots on the website, or at least I couldn't find them. (By "proper", I mean 1:1 actual pixels, not some photoshopped screen mockup.)

May be an age problem. Slackware has a homepage stuck in the 1990s.

In the past it made more sense to have a shitty webpage because open source projects don't tend to have graphic designers contributing to them, but anyone can AI a decent looking static site these days, so it wouldn't surprise me if some of those open source maintainers start choosing to use them.

It's not weird, but it is wrong. I have used zorin as my daily driver for years now, and it's a great, boring Ubuntu distro. I love it.

I’m used to Linux having a user experience that looks like a wiki or a professor’s website.

At this point Linux is stable and works and is reliable. It just usually looks jankey.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the zorin desktop experience reminded me of a professional OS.

You can so easily vibe code a landing page that these days still having a bad landing page suggests you really don’t care about the details, and that’s a bad sign.

It’s a brochure website.

thats probably because so many people are downloading a 5~7 GB file.

a mirror site[s] or a reputable torrent, would likely be helpful.

try these:

https://zorin.com/os/download/18/core/

https://zorin.com/os/download/18/education/

More than other distros, Zorin markets (and has marketed) itself as Windows-like, which probably elevates it in search rankings and LLM queries for people looking for a distro that more closely mirrors what they’re familiar with.

People really, really want a “Windows, but just the good parts” with as little deviation and required learning as possible in terms of desktop experience. A distro with a DE that nearly perfectly replicates “greatest hits” Windows versions (2K/XP/7/10) would probably be doing serious numbers right now if it existed.

Probably like MX Linux, which has, for some reason, topped the Distrowatch popularity list for years in front of Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Debian. Strangely enough, CachyOS seems to have adopted the same strategy and it's now first place on that site.

I've been using Linux since 2001, and I honestly I find it funny how these niche flashy distros are popular with the new generations. Probably because newbies follow the screenshots and /r/unixporn posts, instead of caring about support, mind share and governance. Except Arch, because it's both a really good distro and a symbol for cool h4x0r edgelords, so it's where everybody seems to land after playing with the niche distros like Zorin until they inevitably become unsupported.

Rock-solid distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora don't have that "cool" factor so noobs don't even consider them, even though under the hood it's all the same, and on day 2 you just want something that works, rather than something that looks good on a Reddit post.

---

You know Linux has gone mainstream when baby's first distro Zorin has a privacy policy and terms of service page, as it's published by a for-profit company.

It helps that it is built on the same Open Source software that powers the New York Stock Exchange and computers on the International Space Station.

per https://zorin.com/os/

The marketing of it as "looks and feels like Windows 11!" is probably the biggest hook, if one can assume the majority of the 780k are non-powerusers who are wary about the end of Windows 10's support, and getting pwned on the Internet...

It looks good, plus they're good at marketing it and the website is very engaging with telling me what problems of mine it solves and how.

I have to do tech support for grandma. Every few years, her Windows laptop gets so slow that we get her a new one. This time I will test out a switch to Linux instead of buying a new computer. Zorin is the most attractive option because it's the least strange.

Because usually it works, the out of the box deb + snap + flatpak, polished experience cozy look with some presets to minimice friction, + ubuntu LTS its a nice pack.

  > I'd like to ask people who had been using both Ubuntu and MacOS, what would you advise? And MacOS users in particular, are you happy with the direction it has been evolving, and with that of Apple itself?

that being said, personally i am not so happy with apple's direction either, which is sliding (much much more slowly than windows) in the direction of buggy software updates, worse overall ux and more and more marketing driven changes...

i really like ubuntu and kde (kubuntu) and i feel like at some point the ux polish of it and the "de-polishing" of macos at some point will converge where i'd just install linux alongside macos and not miss much (but there are lots of reverse engineering issues remaining)...

so my idea is to stay on macos for while more while figuring out how to plug holes (such as smoother iphone integration) and getting more accustomed to kde/linux/ununtu before fully jumping ship...

idk if that is super helpful, but its where im at now in my thinking.

Hi, had to create an account just to answer. Vendor lock-in is not that much of a problem with macOS; you can install pretty much anything you want and it looks like it will still be in the future unlike mobile platforms. MacOS is very easy to get used to so the transition shouldn't hurt :) If your only concern is vendor lock-in, I think you should be good with macOS. I am saying this as someone who switched to Asahi because I wanted more freedom relative to the desktop environment (wanted a real tiling window manager). MacOS + Apple hardware is an incredible combination that has not been reproduced anywhere. Maybe one thing to be careful of: you cannot install Linux on M3 and M4, so if you want to make a switch later on, you won't be able to. Ah and btw you can dual boot Asahi on M1 and M2!

Hope I helped a little :)

With Tahoe Apple lost me as a customer with their greatest USP: great UX. now it’s no longer any better than the best of Linux, where there is no one monopolist steering the ecosystem.

So I’d go with Ubuntu.

Probably gonna have to explain this for folks unfamiliar with Charlie Brown.

A chromebook or an ipad with a keyboard. Don’t over complicate it for her or anyone else. Give them something that makes what they know even easier, and also open up new avenues without having to learn a lot.

Ubuntu if it’s just an os replacement. She doesn’t know or care what debian or chromium is.

Get her on a Mac if you can. I got my mum to switch to Mac from Windows over a decade ago and it’s been fantastic for both of us. Her support needs dropped from once every two months to once every few years, and she’s been able to do more with her computer than she would ever have attempted on Windows. She’s been using knitting software to make patterns to share and learnt how to use photoshop, all by herself. The computer just working and not breaking anytime she tried something was fantastic for her confidence in trying/learning new things.

Who would run Windows on AWS? I know some companies do, but it's like 0.01% of all Windows machines.

lol

Customized Gnome https://zorin.com/os/details/

Ubuntu with a custom DE that has pre-set options to look like Windows or MacOS, so that people moving to Linux from another OS find themselves at home. The custom DE is based on Gnome according to the Wikipedia page[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorin_OS

Ubuntu with Gnome.

A bit odd that you say long history with Zorin but you imply that there is some connection to "Chinese community," when in fact Zorin Group is an Irish company? I have no skin in this game and never had any desire to use Zorin but I was able to look that up in about two seconds plus their website contact info says Ireland.

It took months for my other half to realize she wasn't on windows anymore after her hdd died and she only knew it because I said I could not install office 365 on Linux so she'd better get used to either libreoffice or onlyoffice is she didn't want to pay 5bucks a month to use a limited web version of office.

I don't see that it needs to be any more of a rude awakening than when os x went BSD.

If all you do is start a browser and maybe an e-mail client then for the majority of users it will be like Windows.

A distro working out-of-the-box for a certain user group is not a weird spinoff. Some people love to economize time; a distro that takes care of exactly that is a good deal.

I don't get why major distros like Kubuntu don't just add a nice looking default theme.

("nice looking" by the standards of the vast majority of people, not some small group of hackers to whom Windows 95 was the pinnacle of design.)

How else will you ship your desktop to less-technical end users? Convince Canonical to include it in Ubuntu by default? Every time you create a customized version of Linux that people can install out of the box, you are by definition creating a distribution.

This opinion is what’s holding Linux back. Having a clean and pleasant user experience on top of a stable Debian based distributed is the goal.