They have a very slick and professional looking webpage. Is it weird that that makes me wary? I’m used to the best distros having webpages that look like a wiki or a professor’s website.

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.