I've been a Windows user since 3.1; and I've even defended Microsoft in the past (particularly 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).
BUT, I won't defend Windows 11 and Microsoft's general direction. I feel like there has been a slow cultural shift within Microsoft, from a core of fantastic engineers surrounding by marketing/sales, to the org's direction being set by marketing/sales UX be damned.
Plus it feels like a lot of the technical expertise retired out, and left a bunch of engineers scared to touch core systems instead preferring to build on top using Web tech. It means that Windows/Office stopped improving, and have actually both regressed significantly.
I've actually found myself recommending MacOS, particularly the prior generation of Macbook Airs which are absurdly powerful with absurd battery life for a fair price. Combine that with the lack of user hostility, and UX, that MacOS brings relative to Windows 11, and it is hard to ignore.
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.
100% agree, I still can't believe how fast windows is deteriorating. With that said, Linux and Debian helped me a lot. I enjoy tech again. With windows I hated 95% of changes, with linux it is the exact opposite. Having some experience since Ubuntu 12.04, it's amazing to see the progress especially of the last 5 years.
> 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)
Apple created a boot loader that allows the device owner to install and run an unsigned OS like Asahi Linux without degrading the system's security when you run MacOS.
Applying security per partition instead of per device gives users more control, and you no longer have to worry about Microsoft having control of the machine's signing keys.
Secure Enclave is actually a real dedicated innovation and everything Apple built around this secure box. And the real innovation is not even the technology, but being focused over a decade to design all products to work without making a backdoor. That cant have been easy over so many years
I don't consider work done to prevent me having complete control of my own hardware to be a positive development. In fact it's one of the worst things they could spend their time on (from a long term global optimum perspective).
I see the effort and engineering. Is it an innovation ?
A secure subsystem sounds pretty familiar to me, we've had that since the early NFC days, and that powered mobile offline payment (NFC) since two decades now.
If macos was bringing it to new heights with incredible applications I'd see the significance of it, but securing login using a TPM is also done by the competition. Apple pushed it farther, but not that much farther as to make it special IMHO.
I mean, even in iOS, I see the point in hardening the system, but that's not just the Secure Enclave, and on the other side of the coin we get nothing else that wasn't there before.
I moved on, as other makers are pushing the enveloppe, but feel it's a shame Apple couldn't keep pushing during the Tim Cook area. Also having no good commercial alternative to Microsoft sucks, and that's where we're heading.
That sounds like a bit of a lazy response. Everybody is complaining about Apple, but they are still 10 years ahead of all competition on some features, and 20-30 years ahead of competition on other features.
I'll mention what I personally think they should do in sheer innovation, which has the potential to have a larger impact than their A and M chips: A device with an e-paper display. E-Ink is almost there for black and white. Maybe Apple is the only company who can pull it off? That would be an enormous difference and benefit for consumers, who could better use their devices outdoors and in well-lit environments instead of gloomy offices.
Every major maker is decades ahead of the competion in some specific niche. By that token Lenovo is 30 years ahead of Apple in customizability and Asus 20 years ahead in RGB lights. I'm not sure that that wins hearts.
On what I care the most, and as a goal Apple set for themselves, Apple still couldn't make the iPad Pro a general use computer. Microsoft is 10 year ahead of them in that regard, even Samsung's Chromebooks end up being more powerful for a "Pro".
Apple couldn't overcome their gaming aversion, and the Vision Pro is such an unattractive product in no small parts because it's at the crossing of that and the iPad "what is a computer" syndrome. I waited for its launch before renewing my headset, and honestly regretted the wait.
Valve came up last week with a set of devices that genuinely looks fresh and opens new doors. Lenovo keeps pushing the boundaries of what a mobile computer looks like, with actually interesting screen/keyboard combinations I'd buy in a heartbeat if I was still commuting. Asus keeps showing the world what a real "Pro" tablet looks like.
Innovation is happening in spades, while Apple still hasn't fulfilled its own promises.
> e-ink display
Chinese makers are already on that beat, and that's where we saw the first e-ink smartphones. Computer wise, I'd expect Lenovo to hit the mark first. Now I get that many here won't touch a laptop with Windows on it, but Linux support is also getting decently good.
> Every major maker is decades ahead of the competion in some specific niche.
Apple is ahead in every aspect which matters for consumers. Touchpad, speakers, battery, performance, operating system, display. And those are incredibly important aspects. Not gigabytes of RAM and such things which people here care about. If another manufacturer made a device which would be as good as Apple on any of those points, people would be singing their praise for years.
If any operating system was released which was half as good for general computing (not administering servers and programming), then likewise. It would be considered incredible.
As for gaming, I'll give you that one. It's not Apple's strong point. Never was. Just like enterprise office suites.
> Chinese makers are already on that beat, and that's where we saw the first e-ink smartphones. Computer wise, I'd expect Lenovo to hit the mark first. Now I get that many here won't touch a laptop with Windows on it, but Linux support is also getting decently good.
Yeah, and they are not consumer ready. The display tech is almost there, but the devices mostly suck because manufacturers seem to not be able to understand how to deliver quality in their products. I expect Apple to be the only company to be able to do that, just like with so many other technologies where others were first.
Their hardware is very good, but it's not as far ahead as you think. Intel makes SOC very comparable to M series in terms of compute and power efficiency. They're rare, but they exist.
And MacOS as an operating system is slipping in many ways to open source competitors. The UI is stagnant in a lot of ways, and actively regressing in others, while open source competitors truck forward. Mind you, the same is true for Windows and to a much larger degree, but still.
Touchpad is not subjective. And we've been waiting for at least 15 years for other manufacturers to compete. Realistically it will take 15 more years before they can be bothered.
Battery life is not subjective. Same for performance, same for display quality, same for speaker quality. I deliberately tried to focus on non-subjective aspects in my original post. If you say that Intel has chips to compete with Apple on a laptop, I believe you. But I haven't heard of any such laptop until now.
As for the operating system, MacOS is getting worse. A lot worse with Tahoe. But it is still the only tolerable operating system if you're working within a GUI. For programmers and sys admins who live in the terminal, this doesn't matter. Neither for people who only stay inside one application (Excel). But if you want to have applications and the operating system working together cohesively in a graphical user interface, MacOS is still about 20 years ahead of competition.
Not to mention sleep/hibernate mode, which is part of the OS, and probably the single most important feature of any portable computing device.
There are many annoying things about Windows but Windows/app switching is light years ahead of MacOS. MacOS is slow, has annoying animations, doesn't have properly working alt+tab.
I fully agree on all hardware points: battery, speakers, displays.
Sleep/hibernate is a big one as well. It's surprising seeing Windows dropping the ball on this one as well.
There are also things MacOS does way worse than Linux. For example Finder is pathetic.
The big problem with Cmd+Tab in MacOS is that it only works well on a US keyboard where you have the little ' key next to Tab to switch between app windows. For non-US keyboards I never figured it out.
So yes, it's a weak point in MacOS. But the discussion isn't whether Apple devices have weak points, it's whether they are innovating or not. And even if they're not perfect, they are still way ahead of the competition, IMO.
You're implying that Linux file managers are much ahead of Finder, what are the innovations they have? One innovation I still miss in Finder is z-snake menus for navigating, moving and copying files:
You are lopping "consumers" in a single basket where they are all supposed to want the exact things Apple focuses on, and even on these aspects Apple isn't guaranteed to be the top choice.
> If another manufacturer made a device which would be as good as Apple on any of those points, people would be singing their praise for years.
If Apple was really hitting perfectly all the important aspects, they would have 90% market share on the PC market. For the record they're at about 15%.
On the bias coming from sticking around nerd circles, yes "normal" customers don't long for shoving 128Gb of RAM in their space heater PC. But they're also not raving about how good the trackpad is, or how the display is such a technical marvel.
You'll see people walking from meeting to meeting with their mouse because they just don't use trackpads (though they might touch their screen if/when it's supported), others spending their days with earbuds in ear because it dual connections to the laptop audio and they never hear the speakers in the whole device's life. Some dock their macbook all day and hook it to a FHD monitor. Everyone will care about different things.
That's the part for me where the Apple laptop line is so uniform, you need to fall pretty near the middle of the target to properly get the benefits.
> Apple is ahead
They are ahead regarding the exact balance they are targeting. But you'll get better perfs if you're willing to go full desktop for instance and don't care about the size and power consumption (the mac pro going the way of the DoDo doesn't help). You'll get more/cheaper memory if you don't care about a unified architecture. Apple's GPU isn't the market leader. You also won't get anything smaller or lighter than the macbook Air. And of course no USB-A on laptops, which surprisingly still stings.
It's obvious but merits to be said: Apple targets a very specific consumer, and won't be optimal for everyone, including people who want more than what Apple offers.
> manufacturers seem to not be able to understand how to deliver quality in their products.
This is more a matter of taster I'd argue, what people see as "quality" will vary. I'm still amazed by people praising the glass backs and metal on the iPhones for instance. An eink laptop will probably be the same deal, going the pragmatic way (mostly plastic/composite) or the Apple way (glass and aluminium)
I feel that we've drifted from our original discussion about innovation. The Mac touchpad hardware/software is genuine innovation. Same for getting great sound into a small laptop, removing pixels from being a factor with high DPI retina displays, same for all-day battery, and same for the M chips. These are all things which change the way we do computing. And these examples are all things where nobody would prefer something worse.
Then some things are up to individual preference and needs. But nobody prefers having a bad touchpad, for example. As for market share, that doesn't say too much about innovation, nor quality. The cheapest beer is always going to sell more than any other beer.
Keeping USB-A or cheaper RAM per dollar aren't innovations in my book. Neither is keeping a computer plugged in. We've had plugged in computers since the beginning, but it's only in recent years that they became truly portable.
> But they're also not raving about how good the trackpad is, or how the display is such a technical marvel.
Everybody I've seen who've tried a MacBook have been ecstatic about the display and the touchpad.
I really wish that other manufacturers made good products to compete with Apple on other aspects than price. And they do, in limited niches. And they also innovate, but they never make good implementations. A plastic e-ink laptop with a next-gen e-ink display would be fantastic. But you just know that the manufacturer is going to make the computer horrible in every other way. Unfortunately.
Greatest non-Apple innovations I can think of on the top of my head: E-Ink, 120hz displays, under-display fingerprint reader, AI/LLM (which is massive), wireless laser mouse. And everything related to gaming/gpu. But nobody is complaining about nVidia not innovating, like everybody is complaining about Apple.
>> But nobody prefers having a bad touchpad, for example
I don't like Apple's touchpad because it's too big and makes their keyboard worse.
I much prefer laptops with smaller touchpad. I usually disable it anyway so most of the time it's wasted space for me which makes my main input device worse.
in which specific industry, for which specific product feature? Google Workspace has largely taken over my bubble, I know there's a world outside my bubble, but for me, Google docs > whatever Microsoft Word is now. O365?
I assume you're responding to the commercial alternatives to Microsoft ?
I was thinking about the OS layer. My understanding is that hardware makers want to discharge responsibility of the OS on other entities, and ideally wouldn't even want to write drivers if they could avoid it. Having a partner you can enter a contract to provide an OS and maintain it for however long is needed is IMHO a huge deal they don't get with linux.
That's why Framework is the only maker coming up with remotely innovative ideas and also supporting linux. I love them for that, but as the other side of the coin they are extremely limited in the business side, they won't even ship to most of SEA for instance.
Apple plowing forward at least brings some competition, we've seen that on the ARM side. And looking at Microsoft(!) and other makers plowing forward on the form factors, I'd wish Apple had followed.
There's a boatload of Linux contractors who will do the technical work for you and maintain it for as long as you want, at the right price. That includes fairly large names like Suse. As far as I'm aware, all of those contractors focus on the embedded Linux market because consumer OEMs simply aren't asking for those services. The major OEMs don't have either the margin or the consumer demand for it, and they're not willing to commit the resources to escape that local minimum.
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.
Everyone is growing up with tablets now and have awful tech skills. The only kids I know who can use a desktop computer are those who game. Where this goes long-term I'm not sure.
Do we get a really simplified OS in the next 10 years that is built for that generation? Who is going to maintain the old stuff?
> 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.
A point that I've often tried to convey among friends and family. No! Todays kids aren't natural tech wizards because they grew into it. All they know is pressing buttons where the UI/UX norms are good enough that you'll figure it out quickly, especially as a kid.
In my early days I'd press commands out of the back of a manual in order to see what my commodore 64 was all about if I didn't load a game. Turned out I was programming basic (at the level you'd expect from a clueless kid, but still)
Later, in the 90's with your family PC, you were bound to learn some stuff just by wanting to play games. Drivers? Filesystem?
Patches? Cracks? OS? Hardware components (you'd not unlikely put it together yourself).
And I think I was born too late for the best of lessons.
A thought in the other direction though. A lot of fields don't really have kids playing their way towards skill. Still people find their way to the frontiers and push on.
Yes! The next generation of computer scientists will be more passionate than we are because they have mastered their craft and got curious despite growing up with dumbed down boring computers.
> Later, in the 90's with your family PC, you were bound to learn some stuff just by wanting to play games. Drivers? Filesystem? Patches? Cracks? OS? Hardware components (you'd not unlikely put it together yourself).
We learned all that, but that knowledge is all but worthless and has been for some time. I wish I had learned programming instead. All these other computing and OS skills become unnecessary as time moves on. Except for VPS hosting with FTP.
Thank God for lucrative work higher up the stack. Maybe programmers will stop being the only scapegoats for rising home prices and the high cost of living.
Right!!! You don't even have to know Morse code to send a message anymore! Don't even get me started on how they don't teach semaphores in school anymore. Kids these days! Next thing you know they won't be writing programs in assembly anymore!! All these kids know how to do is ask the compiler how to do their work for them.
You're correct in a sense, but glossing over a very real problem. You still need some kind of knowledge of how to use a desktop computer for a lot of jobs in the workforce. If all you know is how to click on some apps, then you're at a competitive disadvantage. There are plenty of horror stories of Gen Z being just as bad as Boomers at tech (like can't figure out how to copy files) and that should concern everyone on HN. I'm sure some grow up with raspberry pi computers, but 99% are probably iPad only kids.
Having to tweak the defaults to get something more usable is a huge step back for MacOS. If I wanted to spend time with settings I’d use Linux. I use and recommend Mac OS because historically everything works perfectly out of the box, like an appliance, so I can focus on work and hobbies (that don’t include spending time on the computer as an end goal).
I totally agree, however, (to wax slightly philosophical) things will change, that's just the nature of tech (and the world at large). To play Devil's Advocate: at least MacOS provides these settings, unlike Windows, which does provide some settings, but many things you are just stuck with unless you install some nerd's github project which tweaks low-level settings and hopefully isn't doxxing you to some gov't. I resisted as long as possible moving from Win10->11 because the UI/UX is such an abomination, similarly bad as the new Liquid (Gl)Ass, but at least MacOS is mostly just changing the color scheme, whereas Windows is constantly changing the position of everythign, what happens when you jiggle the mouse, auto-docking, and pretty much everything that can be changed, they have changed - multiple times! Just as soon as I get comfortable with some UX change, they change it again, because I guess the UX department needs to get paid? Every time I re-install Win11 (4 times in the last 12 months due to new PCs, forced upgrades, etc.) I have needed a full week before everything is to my (near) satisfaction, whereas with MacOS it's just these 5 toggles and bam, I can read things again.
I find both Microsoft and Apple have lost the thread with the desktop operating systems. Microsoft seems intent on trying to kill their market share with adware, slow performance, hardware security requirements, etc. while Apple, has made MacOS an after thought that sometimes gets poorly implemented features from iOS. See liquid glass as the latest example.
For the first time in a long time I tried out Linux again using gnome and was shocked at how refreshingly good it was. I still think Linux has a few too may hurdles for most people, but I think most people would prefer the user experience if they gave it a try.
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.
The start menu is one of the first things I used to fix on a brand-new Win10 install: start removing all those useless/annoying tiles until I have nothing left but a list of programs. (On Win11, the first thing I fix is to move the toolbar back to left-justified instead of centered; then I fix the start menu tiles).
But I do wish graphics designers would learn to leave well enough alone. People don't want their UI to change on them every 5-10 years. They want to learn one UI and stick with it. The Windows 7 UI was just about perfect; if they had kept that UI while changing internals not visible to the user, they would have had far faster adoption of Windows 10. As it is, I know many people who stuck to Windows 7 for as long as possible until the free-upgrade period was about to run out.
EDIT: I'm not saying there weren't things about the Win7 UI that couldn't be improved. The new Terminal app is immensely better than Conhost. IMMENSELY. But that's an incremental change, not a UI replacement.
The Windows 95 left tile was basically perfect. A lot of Linux distros have something similar. It allows you to quickly survey the useful programs. There is no further perfection.
A close second in my book was the PlayStation 3 User Interface. Gloriously intuitive. PlayStation 4 and the new XBox are god awful. I can't wait to buy a Steam Machine and never have to search for my freaking game again like on the XBox monstrosity that has all kinds of crapware on it. Is frustrating your users good for business?
Windows 8 and the Ubuntu of around that time both had absolutely bonkers interfaces. Is it better for a phone? Sure....but I'm not using a phone. Windows 8 was so bad I honestly can't believe it wasn't blocked by upper management. It made all the previous customer/user knowledge worthless. I literally had to memorize all these Window Key + letter commands just to shut down the computer and find the My Documents.
I hung onto win7 till the last possible moment. I don't really miss it but it was a lot more cohesive then 10. Thinking about it i'm increasingly convinced the guys in charge of the taskbar were not on speaking terms with anyone else at Windows and the control panel team all retired or left 6 months before the people designing the settings app arrived.
Just so that you don't accuse me of looking through rose tinted lenses, i think xp looks horrible. Admittedly design has moved on, but i don't remember ever loving it.
I remember it being called "Windows FP" where FP stood for Fischer-Price (maker of colorful plastic toys for babies and toddlers) at the time. Lots of people hated the design of XP after using Win98/2000. I got used to it, but much preferred 7 when it came out. There's a reason why Linux Mint's UI is modeled more or less after the style of Windows 7, not XP or 10.
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
I was recently using an ancient Celeron laptop from like 2006 with Windows Vista, a HDD, and something like 256 MB of RAM, and was blown away by how reasonably performant it was compared to my expectations, especially considering it was a budget laptop in its time.
All that performance is still available with Linux, and it's great. I use plenty of modern systems, but my home desktop is over 12 years old (from the last generation of hardware before everything was locked down) with Debian 13. Turn it on, log in, and the fraction of a second it takes for the login screen to disappear is all it takes for the system to be fully up and running.
This was ~2 years ago, but it didn't work on my side. Closing the lid would put the laptop to sleep then quickly wake it up, fan spinning at full speed even if unplugged. I think I used their diagnosing tool and one cause was some non-microsoft (installed by a driver I think, laptop as almost new) scheduled task, so not fully their fault, but forcing this kind of much weaker/unstable sleep without backup when S3 worked well is a bit crazy to me.
(by the way the laptop was a Framework 13 AMD, curious if others experienced the same. Maybe they fixed it now)
For a long time I had issues with my laptop's battery being dead, even when I put it away fully charged.
Until one day when I unpacked it and found that it was both hot and already running, and decided that this had to end.
I found that there was a process that was part of a printer driver which existed only to spam notifications about buying printer supplies, and that some fucking sadist at HP absolutely buried into Windows as a task that would wake the computer to do this even if it was unplugged.
Because that's what I need in my life: A laptop that wakes up to check the supplies on a printer that I don't even own.
The Framework 16 had an issue where the closed lid would flex slightly in your backpack, and press keys on the keyboard, waking up the computer. Ten days ago (Nov 14th), Framework released a BIOS update for the 16 that would turn off the keyboard (and numeric pad) when the lid was closed. I installed that update immediately, and for the first time, when I pulled my laptop out of my backpack after leaving the office and going home (or the reverse), it was still suspended. Had nothing to do with Windows drivers (I run Linux on this laptop), was purely a physical issue.
I haven't checked if the Framework 13 got BIOS updates at the same time. But you could check if the keyboard is causing the wakeup (the Framework 13 has the same keyboard as the 16, but its smaller screen means less flexing in a backpack so it might not be suffering the same issue) by opening a Notepad window before putting the computer to sleep and closing the lid. If you find that random characters have been typed into Notepad while it's sleeping, then the issue was the same that the 16 was experiencing: the keyboard needs to be disabled while the lid is closed. If you don't see random typing with the lid closed, then it's a different issue.
> closed lid would flex slightly in your backpack, and press keys on the keyboard,
FYI: Over time, this repeated pressure + rubbing (especially with dust or grit in between) can leave permanent key-shaped marks or “ghosts” on the screen. Thin laptops and bags that are tightly packed or bulging make this a lot more likely, since there’s less rigidity and more pressure on the lid.
Still not? It's a feature everyone needs i'm assuming lots of people at microsoft own laptops. Mac probably figured it out around the same time as the declaration of independence was drafted.
That one is arguably Intel’s fault. The last few generations of intel macbooks did the same thing, and I had the same issues under Linux (except they were debuggable there, and clearly Intel’s problem).
Apple fixed it by switching to their own processors. MacOS is sliding fast too though. If I leave my MacBook plugged in overnight, it’s toasty in the morning at least half the time.
Not sure how many times it died because it was low at night and I forgot to plug it in, and how many were failed sleeps.
To me that was Windows 2000. One day in 1999, I was at the local bookstore going over computer magazines and one of them came with CD to preview Windows 2000. I was mostly a Windows 98/RedHat user at that point, so I decided to try it out.
It almost instantly won me over with the leap in stability due to the NT kernel, but the craziest thing was this feature called "Hibernate". This was the time when booting was painfully slow, and here was a feature that not just booted rapidly, but dropped me into the previous session with all apps open! It was pure magic. I switched over to Linux exclusively a few years after that, but this was the feature that prolonged that decision for a long time. I don't think Linux ever got a useable hibernate, but the feature became not as necessary due to the advent of SSDs.
I feel this even in the edutainment system of my car. It’s one year old. Actual 1-2 second delays per key just to type in an address in the map. wtf is wrong with the industry now.
> 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.
Excel and Visual Studio, .NET Runtime and C#, Windows 2000 were among the best things for their time. I think there were like 2-3 months in which even internet explorer was the best browser on the market
My operating system teacher was a hardcore Linux zealot and "M$" hater. But one day he praised Microsoft for Active Directory and group policies. Comparable, well integrated easy to use solutions didn't exist at the time. (mid 2000s). Batch scripts were lame though...
Currently, I do, but mostly I mean whatever last year's generation of Macbook Air is. Since you get the best bang for your buck that way, and there are some incredible deals on the M3 and will likely be on the M4 when it is replaced.
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
The worst part is, there are now two control panels (the other is called "Settings"). Some settings are in both, while others are only in one or the other.
No, they absolutely know. They've been very very slowly migrating stuff over to the new Settings panel bit by bit. If you look at what's in Control Panel now, it's maybe half as much as what used to be in there ten years ago.
That said, it's insanely ridiculous that it's taken 10 years to get it even halfway done.
I feel like Windows 7 was the best Windows of all time.
It was fast, stable enough to work for months or years without crashing, secure, didn't need frequent re-installs, didn't need constant cleaning / defragmenting, didn't have (too many) anti-features nobody wanted or used, it just did what you wanted it to do.
It definitely helped that it existed in an era of app monetization through targeted advertising, as opposed to monetization through bloatware, start page hijacking and completely unnecessary toolbars.
8 was when things started going sideways. 10 was not bad, but it already started the "Microsoft knows better" trend, with automatic updates you couldn't turn off and files you couldn't touch, even as administrator. 11 is what it is.
Ditto on legacy of Windows use, and really ‘legacy’ is what it boils down to for me - it’s the devil I know, and you’re a fool if you don’t think MacOS is an angel here - or even whatever -nix flavour you prefer.
It’s been my experience that matter what OS you try to pick up, the most likely case is you mutter “why the fuck do people put up with this” and go back to the one you’re used to, because at least you mostly know the tricks and pitfalls and can get it to do what you want.
Very sleek marketing, but why did they rebrand (the fantastic) KDE Connect to "Zorin Connect"[1]? From the mere <30 commits, I see no reason for the fork, only confused users.
If it was tightly integrated into the OS I could sort of understand not mentioning its name, like you don't want "Foobar Control Panel" and "FizzBuzz Start Menu". But KDE Connect is a standalone app you can install even on Windows. And this is not just hiding the name, it's replacing it!
So, why the "rebrand"[2]? It feels like an attempt at stealing credit.
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.
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.
They could get more outcome FOR less effort, and that begs a question: is there not a KDE (or Gnome) configuration which explicitly aims to be Windows-10/11 friendly in terms of placement and behaviour of decor and standard CTRL- bindings?
Honestly that's one of the thing where Linux is truly behind other os. Design really need someone to step up, gnome choices are really debatable, kde is great but c'mon.. it's not for beginners or people who just want things to work.
I found that Linux mint desktop environment is the best of both world, zorin a bit behind then everything else.
there is actually nothing complex or hard to understand about KDE. You can navigate your way around as you would with any other piece of software you're new to.
My 8 and 11 year old both use KDE. About 10 minutes and they figured out enough to start a browser and mod Minecraft.
I think the people who have the hardest time are those who think they know what they’re doing so feel they need to change things.
I’ve never seen a beginner at anything start digging through settings wildly, and experienced people know what they want to change. It’s that middle ground.
maybe i'm less smart that your 8 years old, i remember i wanted to switch the bottom bar to the left and the overlay was so cumbersome... i tried a few things and ended up breaking the layout.
I tried KDE Plasma 6.5 on my gaming rig recently and found it quite intuitive. It retains most of the usual keyboard shortcuts and expected behaviors. Granted I'm a "power user" unafraid of dialogs and errors, but I bet my parents could figure it out.
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 the medium is the message here. When I see Arch's home page, I know it will be a hobby OS where there's countless hours of fun in terminal land editing config files. That's how I know it's not for me.
I mean, ignoring the fact that it's one example versus a list of examples I posted, I still don't think Debian website is that bad. I remember how it used to be, when it had a link to get the CDs with the distro and the option of getting all the packages in the package manager repository. Debian evolved like everybody else.
To me, and of course this is personal, Debian website looks pretty professional in an enterprise-y kind of way. I quite like it.
But then again, it's one example. Hell, even OpenSUSE's website looks super slick and modern.
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!
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.
Some people appreciate a nice looking site, they just didn’t have time to spend making it look nice. Now those people have the option of doing that without a huge time commitment, so undoubtedly some of them will.
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.)
Solaris is dying, Irix last release was in 2006, is nowhere to be seen, all that is left is AIX and HP-UX but their available desktops are the very same you find on Linux and the BSDs
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.
> having a bad landing page suggests you really don’t care about the details, and that’s a bad sign.
That depends upon your definition of a good landing page. Personally, I will pay more attention to a Linux distribution if the landing page has information that is valuable to the community. If it looks like they are trying to sell something, I will just move on. In a way, I treat caring about the details as a bad sign (though I realize that I am just prioritizing a different set of details).
> 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.
"Looks like a wiki or a professors web page" is not "bad landing page", it's "aesthetic that is not the mainstream aesthetic". We're not talking about "things don't line up", we're talking about functional.
And frankly, if I see that someone pointedly doesn't vibe-code their landing page, that's a good sign that they're not phoning in the rest of the work, too.
"At least vibe code it, so people know you care about detail"
Do you see the irony there?
If something is a cheap template or just vibe-coded slop, it denotes precisely that someone doesn't care about detail. It's exactly for those style-over-substance people that these tools exist!
That's not to say that a dated, perfunctory, or poor attempt might not suggest a lack of interest in detail itself, or at least a lack of personal insignt for user experience. It could, but vibe coding delivers no cheat around that. It just writes it in big bold letters.
It seems as if Microsoft really put the gun to many people. Many things they don't want in Win11 yet Microsoft does not listen.
Hopefully that will last - Microsoft has caused more than enough damage at this point in time. Quality-wise I feel the new Win-releases are progressively getting worse, less and less caring what users may want.
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.
Kinda. Lindows didn't resemble Windows as closely as its name might suggest and played with fire with its naming. Ideally this new distro would have a custom built DE made to be as close as possible visually and functionally, yet legally distinct (which a skilled designer can easily pull off) and would not tie the branding to Microsoft or Windows in any way.
> 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.
"Zorin Look Changer" used to "let you select from Windows 7, XP, Vista, Ubuntu Unity, Mac OS X or GNOME 2" themes, whilst newer versions want you to pay nearly $50 for the privilege (although they have significantly reduced their offerings, with their "Windows Classic" theme just being their "Windows-list like" theme with a slightly different start menu).
I have never used Zorin or its theme changer, but I strongly doubt it's much better than what can be accomplished by installing a third party theme, which are never that good and only resemble the mimicked operating systems in the broadest of strokes.
Shrug? Our experiences have been totally different then.
I bought an older version of Zorin, probably 15 or 16, to review for a blog, and I was totally impressed with the consistency of the theming.
To each their own, but Zorin is a cheap on-ramp for people coming from older Windows/Mac and looking for a somewhat apples-to-apples experience of Windows or Mac, with actual updates and not a bunch of ads or telemetry.
The consistency of the theming isn’t the issue, it’s that it’s just theming (unless I’m just misunderstanding). KDE or GNOME with an XP theme applied settings toggled still acts like KDE or GNOME rather than acting like XP. The resemblance is skin-deep.
Good theming is great to have, but what’s more important is that the user’s prior experience and muscle memory still applies, e.g. the task manager can be summoned in the same ways, settings panels are structured similarly (and aren’t either overflowing or too stripped down like KDE and GNOME, respectively), key shortcuts are the same with no caveats, etc.
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.
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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.
Distros like Debian and Ubuntu also suffer from issues with compatibility with newer hardware due to their older kernels. This is part of why distros based on Fedora and Fedora Atomic (such as Nobara and Bazzite, respectively) have seen popularity.
Also, gamers at least want the latest drivers. Not the ones from three weeks ago. The latest ones. That's why everyone is recommending Arch-based distros for that purpose. I'm currently on Pop, and waiting months for Mesa updates is no fun.
I find Fedora hits a nice sweet spot between compatibility/updates and random breakage, especially since they backport KDE versions along with kernels.
I have tried Debian, but I found that the software on the main version was out-of-date, and the testing version eventually broke during an update (which is when I abandoned it.) It's not something I'd recommend to a new Linux user.
The question is, do you really need the newer versions? If so, maybe check availability via backports or extrepo.
From my perspective a solid OS that stays out of my way most of the time outweighs the slight disadvantage of working with older software versions. YMMV.
On that I agree. I run Fedora Atomic and I'm not switching to any other non-atomic distro ever again. Once you get used to the papercuts, the old model of overwriting system files and hoping for the best is antiquated to say the least. (And no, I don't care for NixOS, sorry)
I'm still wishing very hard for a serious and battle-tested Arch-based atomic distro, so I can chuck Fedora and its RPM packaging model into the flaming sun.
Stable with back ports works well for me. I have not upgraded to Trixie yet and have 6.12, which handles dev work, Steam, and llama.cpp (ROCm) without issue.
I'm going to have to tap the sign for distrowatch not being a measure of popularity: https://blog.popey.com/2021/01/distrowatch-is-not-a-measure-... A very small number of linux users have ever even heard of distrowatch, much less ever visited it, it's totally irrelevant for anything other than news about distros, which again only a tiny portion of people care about.
But it is amusing when I hear about distros that are "doing numbers" and it's the first I've heard of them. I don't really care about how many downloads, though, what's more interesting is weekly or monthly active users based on unique IP hits to update servers. (Some distros track and publish this.) Recently Bazzite, a distro targeting gamers, hit 31.6k weekly active users, not bad for something only a couple years old. (Over 2 years ago, Ubuntu Desktop was at 6 million monthly active users.)
Smaller distros have more incentive to boost their perceived popularity -- as a Gentoo user I don't really care so much about popularity (and I'm happy to see more Linux adoption in general regardless of distro) but about longevity. But I guess props to Zorin, they've apparently been around as an Ubuntu derivative since 2009 despite this being the first I've heard of them. Yet only two years ago did they get the ability to dist-upgrade, so I wonder wtf they were doing for the prior years: https://blog.zorin.com/2023/07/27/zorin-os-16.3-is-released/
I don't trust Distrowatch's popularity list. I have thought for years it was probably gamed.
There are constantly distros in that top ten list that aren't in other top ten lists like mentions of reddit, mention on Twitter, Google searches for "linux distro", etc.
The distrowatch rankings are based on page views to the distros section on the site. So the distros that lead the rankings tend to be moderately popular distros that link to that page on their site.
The problem is Gnome have really committed themselves to screwing up UI paradigms.
I'd be much less happy with Linux if Cinnamon DE didn't exist because that's essentially a Windows like experience without the BS.
Conversely the default Gnome desktop is awful IMO.
Taskbar, start button and menus all have decades of proven effectiveness, no one needed to mess with them just get the details right (e.g. fonts and interactions).
You know what is proven effective? Not needing to reach for a mouse to interact with taskbar, start button and menus. GNOME is extremely effective as long as you aren't a clicker. If you want to stick to a 30 year old desktop metaphor that's on you but the rest of us have moved on.
I often see people praising gnome for it's keyboard efficiency but they are not even 10% as good as macos.
If they cared so much, they would have keyboard shortcut for everything, in every app, with the top bar displaying menu and every shortcut attributed to it, just like macos.
Instead you can use the keyboard to switch an app, close it and so on but once you are working inside, you immediately need to take your mouse. What's the point ? It saves 1 second and confuse lot of beginners.
I'm not sure what you mean - pretty much every modern GNOME application has keyboard shortcuts. In fact they use a consistent keyboard shortcut to bring up the screen that shows all the keyboard shortcuts: ctrl+?
What i mean is that the keyboard shortcut in gnome application is lackluster. there must be a dozen per app, whereas on macos every single function has a keyboard shorcut. Even KDE has more.
I like the gnome paradigm. The gnome implementation is bad though. I was promised that xwayland would be the bridge to a glorious future yet stuff like pointer confinement just doesn’t work and their implementation of refresh rate doesn’t play nicely with vscode. So, the reality is I still use KDE even if it’s not quite as visionary.
I’ll echo the other commenters who are praising Gnome. It is pretty keyboard-centric. Once you’re used to it, it’s quite nice. I’ve moved on to Niri, and can’t imagine going back to a floating window manager, but between Windows, macOS, and Gnome, I prefer Gnome hands down.
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...
Ironic.. Stay on Windows 10 and risk getting your data stolen through unpatched exploits, or throw away your perfectly good computer and contribute to the climate disaster, get Windows 11, and lose sovereignty over your data to Microsoft...
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.
it seems the link has changed, or corrected, but lands at a "blog" page Re zorin and install instructions. my OP has a couple links direct to the ISO downloads.
they are large files, and move slow. its been the better part of a day and its almost finished downloading for me.
If people stopped creating weird spinoff distros, which offer zero value except for a preconfigured Desktop, the entire Linux Desktop ecosystem would be in a far better place.
These distros focus on aesthetics choice, but underneath they are always plagued by the same things, tiny maintainer teams completely overwhelmed with the task of managing a distribution. Leading to a great first impression, but an inevitable breakdown in usability.
Every single person would be better served by Kubuntu than Zorin. Simply because Kubuntu has far superior backing behind it.
There are hundreds of these weird distros, targeting different audiences and they are all terrible, because none of them have the actual capabilities of maintaining their distro.
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.
None of these distros economize time. This is not Debian/Arch/Ubuntu with some preconfiguration. Every single user of these distros is in the hands of a tiny number of developers who mostly work on this as a hobby. Things are going to break and they will break in ways nobody will know why, since the base distro does not have these problems.
There is a very good reason why the Arch forums do want reports from arch derivatives, because they are all inevitably broken by their tiny maintainer teams.
Zorin is not a hobby distro. They are a small company that does this for profit. You may like or dislike that, but your assessment is wrong in this case.
I think Kubuntu looks very reasonable and switching KDE themes is as simple as it gets.
Where I think you are right is that it would be very feasible to create a few different builds of e.g. Kubuntu which come with different presets or make those available during installation, with easy switching in the life desktop environment. Maintaining each one should be quite simple, as it is just a few packages, with some configuration on top.
Exactly, you do that by installing Debian with KDE. Not by creating a new distro, which you do not have the resources to properly maintain, which is then perpetually broken in weird ways, which no user can figure out since the base distribution does not have the problems the completely understaffed maintainers introduced.
What all of these distros want to be is a basic configuration script. What they are is a nightmare for every user, since the user is now in the hands of a few people, who as a hobby are maintaining his OS and occasionally will break it.
It is so bizarre that so many people want to make distros, when they are completely unequipped up do so.
Username checks out. Not everyone wants to use Debian stable, with 3 year old packages. And most certainly not everyone wants to use KDE. Choice is what makes the Linux ecosystem great even if it leads to fragmentation. Most distros are created by volunteers, what do you contribute?
> Not by creating a new distro, which you do not have the resources to properly maintain
Given the fact said distro is based on Ubuntu LTS there is very little to maintain except a set of themes and desktop customisation and default choices. The long support cycle makes it that the Zorin team is not facing major changes so often as they keep the same Gnome version for a long time. This is a perfectly decent sokution for people who do not feel the need to stay current with the latest version of any given desktop at all time.
You could also ask why XFCE does not use KDE in the background and just work on apps and provide their own KDE theme instead. They can't even make a wayland session in 2025 working so why bother? Or unity, mate, Pantheon from elemenetary os - why don't they just stick to being a theme on top of gnome or KDE and instead focus on the apps?
It would be a really huge advantage if there were a really clean way to browse, apply, and (extremely importantly) reverse and remove such a configuration script. I've tried using KDE's customization options to tweak my desktop, and what I found is that I'm very capable of creating the worst desktop I've ever used.
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.
Delighted to see something made in Ireland that didn't come from a multinational... The Zorin brothers have worked on this since they were teenagers.
https://stconleths.ie/the-zorin-brothers-technology-for-huma...
They were even on the national news a few weeks back!
The pro version comes with "Professional-grade creative suite", but they don't tell you what you're actually getting. It's just opaque corporate-speak one-liners "Make real progress toward your goals".
I’m looking for a replacement OS for my mother in law whose computer is aging out of Windows 10 support. I’m glad to see slick distributions like this trying to fill that gap.
That said her requirements are _so_ simple that Debian with Chromium would probably satisfy 100% of her requirements which are ‘download documents from gmail and print them’.
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.
I bought my mom a MacBook Air and put Brave on it. Brave, more than anything, fixed all of her problems (the shitty state of the web). I could have just as easily given her a good Linux laptop, I think.
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.
Sounds like they're on the market for a new OS, not a new computer, which I think is the situation a lot of Windows 10 users are finding themselves in.
An iPad with a keyboard folio is generally even better for these kind of users. They can do everything they want and need, and the OS is uncomplicated. And of course never breaks.
I've been using Ubuntu for 3 years now, and now that I'm about to upgrade my 13 y.o. laptop, there's a dilemma for me between choosing some top(ish)-spec x86_64 laptop or macbook pro M4.
The former just keeps me going with Ubuntu, but forces to still dual-boot Windows for some creative software I use that Ubuntu lacks (a certain DAW and a CAD modeller). The latter gives me an awesome (or so it seems) OS that is much closer in spirit to Ubuntu than to Windows and supports everything I need, but leaves me vendor-locked to whatever user-hostile directions Apple might take in the future.
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?
> 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?
macos out-of-the-box experience is gonna be much better and smoother and more consistent than ubuntu for sure, and you get both unix environment and most desktop software (check first of course) that windows has too...
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!
Oh, thank you very much for chiming in! That twist on Asahi x M3+ was interesting - is that because something wasn't ported yet and the support will be there one day, or there'll be a hard block for Asahi forever for M3+?
From what I understood, the CPUs are different and need work for them to be supported. There is no hard block, but sadly, two key people resigned from the Asahi Linux team.
I am not even sure if there is someone even trying to work on this.
Another example is microphone support on M2 series that's not there yet.
Many issues with Asahi are also that there is an incompatibility in page sizes (16k on MX vs 4k on most CPUs), and combined with the usage of ARM, software compatibility is an actual problem if you want to use VMs, DAW software (nothing will work there except Reaper ...)
(Maybe this paragraph was a bit ranty, but I'm actually very glad we got Asahi in the first place. It's my daily driver and I'm relatively happy with it)
TL;DR: no hard blocker but there is a people "problem"
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.
I have a long history with ZorinOS, and I will make it very short.
They are grifters.
The simple fact is that they release open source software, much of which is licensed as GPL. They modify these programs from time to time to be compatible with ZorinOS, etc.
They refuse to release any of their sources sometimes, and when they do, they put takedowns and ban people from their community because they believe their paid-for ISOs are closed-source - which is not true.
If you think I'm wrong, mistaken, lying, etc. grab any ZorinOS ISO and go put it on a ZorinOS community website, such as Reddit and sit back and watch.
It's worth mentioning I find all of the ZorinOS downloads using DHT scan. I haven't touched them in a while, but I still find the entire situation perplexing. I have to imagine part of this issue is that the Chinese community is newer to FOSS and doesn't understand these longstanding ideas.
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.
I'm not claiming that any specific companies are registered in China or operate from China. It's possible that because many Chinese users are using Zorin this is why their community has taken a different stance on free/open software licensing.
EDIT: Either way, my main point is that Zorin is responsible for how they redistribute the source code and other modifications to the software they sell. They refuse to do that sometimes, and they gaslight their community / the open source community.
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].
One thing that's important but rarely mentioned in discussions like these is how many Windows users even have experience working on unix systems these days? I feel like they are in for a rude awakening if they assume every OS is like windows
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.
What, normalizing being able to access the entire world of knowledge and cultural information, and talk to family and loved one's easily and at any distance?
I know right. Absolute travesty. Come on grandpa, why aren't you programming?
As someone who refused to "upgrade" to Vista 15+ years ago and has been using GNU/Linux ever since I'm absolutely amazed by people's tolerance. What took you people so long? I've had 15 years of freedom and joy. But I'm glad more people are finally seeing the light.
I've been a Windows user since 3.1; and I've even defended Microsoft in the past (particularly 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).
BUT, I won't defend Windows 11 and Microsoft's general direction. I feel like there has been a slow cultural shift within Microsoft, from a core of fantastic engineers surrounding by marketing/sales, to the org's direction being set by marketing/sales UX be damned.
Plus it feels like a lot of the technical expertise retired out, and left a bunch of engineers scared to touch core systems instead preferring to build on top using Web tech. It means that Windows/Office stopped improving, and have actually both regressed significantly.
I've actually found myself recommending MacOS, particularly the prior generation of Macbook Airs which are absurdly powerful with absurd battery life for a fair price. Combine that with the lack of user hostility, and UX, that MacOS brings relative to Windows 11, and it is hard to ignore.
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.
100% agree, I still can't believe how fast windows is deteriorating. With that said, Linux and Debian helped me a lot. I enjoy tech again. With windows I hated 95% of changes, with linux it is the exact opposite. Having some experience since Ubuntu 12.04, it's amazing to see the progress especially of the last 5 years.
As someone who used to make tools for Windows admins I apologize for not doing more to make your life better.
This may be reversed correlation.
People I’ve known with deteriorating health lost their interest in tech beyond familiar point A to point B.
My coworkers who left Microsoft started doing a lot better once they left, it's a bad place to be right now.
I misread your comment - I thought you meant devs running Windows as their OS!
Not developing it.
Ah yes running Windows only makes you a little more depressed
^_^
> 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)
Apple created a boot loader that allows the device owner to install and run an unsigned OS like Asahi Linux without degrading the system's security when you run MacOS.
Applying security per partition instead of per device gives users more control, and you no longer have to worry about Microsoft having control of the machine's signing keys.
I'm not versed into that part. Does it bring significant improvements (more secure or flexible ?) over UEFI secure boot ?
UEFI has a massively larger attack surface, and secure boot is either on or off for the whole machine.
So UEFI is both less secure and less flexible.
Secure Enclave is actually a real dedicated innovation and everything Apple built around this secure box. And the real innovation is not even the technology, but being focused over a decade to design all products to work without making a backdoor. That cant have been easy over so many years
I don't consider work done to prevent me having complete control of my own hardware to be a positive development. In fact it's one of the worst things they could spend their time on (from a long term global optimum perspective).
I see the effort and engineering. Is it an innovation ?
A secure subsystem sounds pretty familiar to me, we've had that since the early NFC days, and that powered mobile offline payment (NFC) since two decades now.
If macos was bringing it to new heights with incredible applications I'd see the significance of it, but securing login using a TPM is also done by the competition. Apple pushed it farther, but not that much farther as to make it special IMHO.
I mean, even in iOS, I see the point in hardening the system, but that's not just the Secure Enclave, and on the other side of the coin we get nothing else that wasn't there before.
I take your point, but the audio engineering on the laptop and tablet offerings of the past 5 years is mind blowing.
Well what do you want?
Sheer innovation.
I moved on, as other makers are pushing the enveloppe, but feel it's a shame Apple couldn't keep pushing during the Tim Cook area. Also having no good commercial alternative to Microsoft sucks, and that's where we're heading.
That sounds like a bit of a lazy response. Everybody is complaining about Apple, but they are still 10 years ahead of all competition on some features, and 20-30 years ahead of competition on other features.
I'll mention what I personally think they should do in sheer innovation, which has the potential to have a larger impact than their A and M chips: A device with an e-paper display. E-Ink is almost there for black and white. Maybe Apple is the only company who can pull it off? That would be an enormous difference and benefit for consumers, who could better use their devices outdoors and in well-lit environments instead of gloomy offices.
Every major maker is decades ahead of the competion in some specific niche. By that token Lenovo is 30 years ahead of Apple in customizability and Asus 20 years ahead in RGB lights. I'm not sure that that wins hearts.
On what I care the most, and as a goal Apple set for themselves, Apple still couldn't make the iPad Pro a general use computer. Microsoft is 10 year ahead of them in that regard, even Samsung's Chromebooks end up being more powerful for a "Pro".
Apple couldn't overcome their gaming aversion, and the Vision Pro is such an unattractive product in no small parts because it's at the crossing of that and the iPad "what is a computer" syndrome. I waited for its launch before renewing my headset, and honestly regretted the wait.
Valve came up last week with a set of devices that genuinely looks fresh and opens new doors. Lenovo keeps pushing the boundaries of what a mobile computer looks like, with actually interesting screen/keyboard combinations I'd buy in a heartbeat if I was still commuting. Asus keeps showing the world what a real "Pro" tablet looks like.
Innovation is happening in spades, while Apple still hasn't fulfilled its own promises.
> e-ink display
Chinese makers are already on that beat, and that's where we saw the first e-ink smartphones. Computer wise, I'd expect Lenovo to hit the mark first. Now I get that many here won't touch a laptop with Windows on it, but Linux support is also getting decently good.
> Every major maker is decades ahead of the competion in some specific niche.
Apple is ahead in every aspect which matters for consumers. Touchpad, speakers, battery, performance, operating system, display. And those are incredibly important aspects. Not gigabytes of RAM and such things which people here care about. If another manufacturer made a device which would be as good as Apple on any of those points, people would be singing their praise for years.
If any operating system was released which was half as good for general computing (not administering servers and programming), then likewise. It would be considered incredible.
As for gaming, I'll give you that one. It's not Apple's strong point. Never was. Just like enterprise office suites.
> Chinese makers are already on that beat, and that's where we saw the first e-ink smartphones. Computer wise, I'd expect Lenovo to hit the mark first. Now I get that many here won't touch a laptop with Windows on it, but Linux support is also getting decently good.
Yeah, and they are not consumer ready. The display tech is almost there, but the devices mostly suck because manufacturers seem to not be able to understand how to deliver quality in their products. I expect Apple to be the only company to be able to do that, just like with so many other technologies where others were first.
This is very subjective.
Their hardware is very good, but it's not as far ahead as you think. Intel makes SOC very comparable to M series in terms of compute and power efficiency. They're rare, but they exist.
And MacOS as an operating system is slipping in many ways to open source competitors. The UI is stagnant in a lot of ways, and actively regressing in others, while open source competitors truck forward. Mind you, the same is true for Windows and to a much larger degree, but still.
Mac OS UX is fairly atrocious now. It was slowly regressing for some time, but Liquid Glass on MacOS actively makes me sad.
Touchpad is not subjective. And we've been waiting for at least 15 years for other manufacturers to compete. Realistically it will take 15 more years before they can be bothered.
Battery life is not subjective. Same for performance, same for display quality, same for speaker quality. I deliberately tried to focus on non-subjective aspects in my original post. If you say that Intel has chips to compete with Apple on a laptop, I believe you. But I haven't heard of any such laptop until now.
As for the operating system, MacOS is getting worse. A lot worse with Tahoe. But it is still the only tolerable operating system if you're working within a GUI. For programmers and sys admins who live in the terminal, this doesn't matter. Neither for people who only stay inside one application (Excel). But if you want to have applications and the operating system working together cohesively in a graphical user interface, MacOS is still about 20 years ahead of competition.
Not to mention sleep/hibernate mode, which is part of the OS, and probably the single most important feature of any portable computing device.
There are many annoying things about Windows but Windows/app switching is light years ahead of MacOS. MacOS is slow, has annoying animations, doesn't have properly working alt+tab.
I fully agree on all hardware points: battery, speakers, displays. Sleep/hibernate is a big one as well. It's surprising seeing Windows dropping the ball on this one as well.
There are also things MacOS does way worse than Linux. For example Finder is pathetic.
The big problem with Cmd+Tab in MacOS is that it only works well on a US keyboard where you have the little ' key next to Tab to switch between app windows. For non-US keyboards I never figured it out.
So yes, it's a weak point in MacOS. But the discussion isn't whether Apple devices have weak points, it's whether they are innovating or not. And even if they're not perfect, they are still way ahead of the competition, IMO.
You're implying that Linux file managers are much ahead of Finder, what are the innovations they have? One innovation I still miss in Finder is z-snake menus for navigating, moving and copying files:
https://discuss.haiku-os.org/uploads/default/original/2X/f/f...
On the other hand Finder does have Miller columns, which to me is the best way to manage and explore files.
You are lopping "consumers" in a single basket where they are all supposed to want the exact things Apple focuses on, and even on these aspects Apple isn't guaranteed to be the top choice.
> If another manufacturer made a device which would be as good as Apple on any of those points, people would be singing their praise for years.
If Apple was really hitting perfectly all the important aspects, they would have 90% market share on the PC market. For the record they're at about 15%.
On the bias coming from sticking around nerd circles, yes "normal" customers don't long for shoving 128Gb of RAM in their space heater PC. But they're also not raving about how good the trackpad is, or how the display is such a technical marvel.
You'll see people walking from meeting to meeting with their mouse because they just don't use trackpads (though they might touch their screen if/when it's supported), others spending their days with earbuds in ear because it dual connections to the laptop audio and they never hear the speakers in the whole device's life. Some dock their macbook all day and hook it to a FHD monitor. Everyone will care about different things.
That's the part for me where the Apple laptop line is so uniform, you need to fall pretty near the middle of the target to properly get the benefits.
> Apple is ahead
They are ahead regarding the exact balance they are targeting. But you'll get better perfs if you're willing to go full desktop for instance and don't care about the size and power consumption (the mac pro going the way of the DoDo doesn't help). You'll get more/cheaper memory if you don't care about a unified architecture. Apple's GPU isn't the market leader. You also won't get anything smaller or lighter than the macbook Air. And of course no USB-A on laptops, which surprisingly still stings.
It's obvious but merits to be said: Apple targets a very specific consumer, and won't be optimal for everyone, including people who want more than what Apple offers.
> manufacturers seem to not be able to understand how to deliver quality in their products.
This is more a matter of taster I'd argue, what people see as "quality" will vary. I'm still amazed by people praising the glass backs and metal on the iPhones for instance. An eink laptop will probably be the same deal, going the pragmatic way (mostly plastic/composite) or the Apple way (glass and aluminium)
I feel that we've drifted from our original discussion about innovation. The Mac touchpad hardware/software is genuine innovation. Same for getting great sound into a small laptop, removing pixels from being a factor with high DPI retina displays, same for all-day battery, and same for the M chips. These are all things which change the way we do computing. And these examples are all things where nobody would prefer something worse.
Then some things are up to individual preference and needs. But nobody prefers having a bad touchpad, for example. As for market share, that doesn't say too much about innovation, nor quality. The cheapest beer is always going to sell more than any other beer.
Keeping USB-A or cheaper RAM per dollar aren't innovations in my book. Neither is keeping a computer plugged in. We've had plugged in computers since the beginning, but it's only in recent years that they became truly portable.
> But they're also not raving about how good the trackpad is, or how the display is such a technical marvel.
Everybody I've seen who've tried a MacBook have been ecstatic about the display and the touchpad.
I really wish that other manufacturers made good products to compete with Apple on other aspects than price. And they do, in limited niches. And they also innovate, but they never make good implementations. A plastic e-ink laptop with a next-gen e-ink display would be fantastic. But you just know that the manufacturer is going to make the computer horrible in every other way. Unfortunately.
Greatest non-Apple innovations I can think of on the top of my head: E-Ink, 120hz displays, under-display fingerprint reader, AI/LLM (which is massive), wireless laser mouse. And everything related to gaming/gpu. But nobody is complaining about nVidia not innovating, like everybody is complaining about Apple.
>> But nobody prefers having a bad touchpad, for example
I don't like Apple's touchpad because it's too big and makes their keyboard worse. I much prefer laptops with smaller touchpad. I usually disable it anyway so most of the time it's wasted space for me which makes my main input device worse.
in which specific industry, for which specific product feature? Google Workspace has largely taken over my bubble, I know there's a world outside my bubble, but for me, Google docs > whatever Microsoft Word is now. O365?
I assume you're responding to the commercial alternatives to Microsoft ?
I was thinking about the OS layer. My understanding is that hardware makers want to discharge responsibility of the OS on other entities, and ideally wouldn't even want to write drivers if they could avoid it. Having a partner you can enter a contract to provide an OS and maintain it for however long is needed is IMHO a huge deal they don't get with linux.
That's why Framework is the only maker coming up with remotely innovative ideas and also supporting linux. I love them for that, but as the other side of the coin they are extremely limited in the business side, they won't even ship to most of SEA for instance.
Apple plowing forward at least brings some competition, we've seen that on the ARM side. And looking at Microsoft(!) and other makers plowing forward on the form factors, I'd wish Apple had followed.
There's a boatload of Linux contractors who will do the technical work for you and maintain it for as long as you want, at the right price. That includes fairly large names like Suse. As far as I'm aware, all of those contractors focus on the embedded Linux market because consumer OEMs simply aren't asking for those services. The major OEMs don't have either the margin or the consumer demand for it, and they're not willing to commit the resources to escape that local minimum.
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.
Everyone is growing up with tablets now and have awful tech skills. The only kids I know who can use a desktop computer are those who game. Where this goes long-term I'm not sure.
Do we get a really simplified OS in the next 10 years that is built for that generation? Who is going to maintain the old stuff?
> 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.
A point that I've often tried to convey among friends and family. No! Todays kids aren't natural tech wizards because they grew into it. All they know is pressing buttons where the UI/UX norms are good enough that you'll figure it out quickly, especially as a kid.
In my early days I'd press commands out of the back of a manual in order to see what my commodore 64 was all about if I didn't load a game. Turned out I was programming basic (at the level you'd expect from a clueless kid, but still) Later, in the 90's with your family PC, you were bound to learn some stuff just by wanting to play games. Drivers? Filesystem? Patches? Cracks? OS? Hardware components (you'd not unlikely put it together yourself).
And I think I was born too late for the best of lessons.
A thought in the other direction though. A lot of fields don't really have kids playing their way towards skill. Still people find their way to the frontiers and push on.
Yes! The next generation of computer scientists will be more passionate than we are because they have mastered their craft and got curious despite growing up with dumbed down boring computers.
> Later, in the 90's with your family PC, you were bound to learn some stuff just by wanting to play games. Drivers? Filesystem? Patches? Cracks? OS? Hardware components (you'd not unlikely put it together yourself).
We learned all that, but that knowledge is all but worthless and has been for some time. I wish I had learned programming instead. All these other computing and OS skills become unnecessary as time moves on. Except for VPS hosting with FTP.
Absolutely not. These are fundamental concepts in our computer world and a step on the latter towards becoming a programmer or sysadmin.
Reminds me of Jon Blow’s talk on preventing the collapse of civilization: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
Thank God for lucrative work higher up the stack. Maybe programmers will stop being the only scapegoats for rising home prices and the high cost of living.
Right!!! You don't even have to know Morse code to send a message anymore! Don't even get me started on how they don't teach semaphores in school anymore. Kids these days! Next thing you know they won't be writing programs in assembly anymore!! All these kids know how to do is ask the compiler how to do their work for them.
You're correct in a sense, but glossing over a very real problem. You still need some kind of knowledge of how to use a desktop computer for a lot of jobs in the workforce. If all you know is how to click on some apps, then you're at a competitive disadvantage. There are plenty of horror stories of Gen Z being just as bad as Boomers at tech (like can't figure out how to copy files) and that should concern everyone on HN. I'm sure some grow up with raspberry pi computers, but 99% are probably iPad only kids.
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
Isn't he that egotistic attention whore who periodically gets ripped to shreds around here?
No, you're mistaking him for another fellow. He's the guy who anonymously slanders people online and doesn't add anything of value.
Plenty of those types floating around SV and tech circles and it doesn't mean he's wrong.
Mac users with longer tenure are also complaining the rot is also creeping through MacOS, especially with Tahoe.
Someone posted these settings on HN recently and it has made working on my Mac once again usable: https://imgur.com/a/macos-accessibility-settings-simpler-ret...
Having to tweak the defaults to get something more usable is a huge step back for MacOS. If I wanted to spend time with settings I’d use Linux. I use and recommend Mac OS because historically everything works perfectly out of the box, like an appliance, so I can focus on work and hobbies (that don’t include spending time on the computer as an end goal).
I totally agree, however, (to wax slightly philosophical) things will change, that's just the nature of tech (and the world at large). To play Devil's Advocate: at least MacOS provides these settings, unlike Windows, which does provide some settings, but many things you are just stuck with unless you install some nerd's github project which tweaks low-level settings and hopefully isn't doxxing you to some gov't. I resisted as long as possible moving from Win10->11 because the UI/UX is such an abomination, similarly bad as the new Liquid (Gl)Ass, but at least MacOS is mostly just changing the color scheme, whereas Windows is constantly changing the position of everythign, what happens when you jiggle the mouse, auto-docking, and pretty much everything that can be changed, they have changed - multiple times! Just as soon as I get comfortable with some UX change, they change it again, because I guess the UX department needs to get paid? Every time I re-install Win11 (4 times in the last 12 months due to new PCs, forced upgrades, etc.) I have needed a full week before everything is to my (near) satisfaction, whereas with MacOS it's just these 5 toggles and bam, I can read things again.
Rumors just came out that next year's release is AI features and bug fixes only. If true, this is great news for the health of their platforms.
I find both Microsoft and Apple have lost the thread with the desktop operating systems. Microsoft seems intent on trying to kill their market share with adware, slow performance, hardware security requirements, etc. while Apple, has made MacOS an after thought that sometimes gets poorly implemented features from iOS. See liquid glass as the latest example.
For the first time in a long time I tried out Linux again using gnome and was shocked at how refreshingly good it was. I still think Linux has a few too may hurdles for most people, but I think most people would prefer the user experience if they gave it a try.
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.
The start menu is one of the first things I used to fix on a brand-new Win10 install: start removing all those useless/annoying tiles until I have nothing left but a list of programs. (On Win11, the first thing I fix is to move the toolbar back to left-justified instead of centered; then I fix the start menu tiles).
But I do wish graphics designers would learn to leave well enough alone. People don't want their UI to change on them every 5-10 years. They want to learn one UI and stick with it. The Windows 7 UI was just about perfect; if they had kept that UI while changing internals not visible to the user, they would have had far faster adoption of Windows 10. As it is, I know many people who stuck to Windows 7 for as long as possible until the free-upgrade period was about to run out.
EDIT: I'm not saying there weren't things about the Win7 UI that couldn't be improved. The new Terminal app is immensely better than Conhost. IMMENSELY. But that's an incremental change, not a UI replacement.
The Windows 95 left tile was basically perfect. A lot of Linux distros have something similar. It allows you to quickly survey the useful programs. There is no further perfection.
A close second in my book was the PlayStation 3 User Interface. Gloriously intuitive. PlayStation 4 and the new XBox are god awful. I can't wait to buy a Steam Machine and never have to search for my freaking game again like on the XBox monstrosity that has all kinds of crapware on it. Is frustrating your users good for business?
Windows 8 and the Ubuntu of around that time both had absolutely bonkers interfaces. Is it better for a phone? Sure....but I'm not using a phone. Windows 8 was so bad I honestly can't believe it wasn't blocked by upper management. It made all the previous customer/user knowledge worthless. I literally had to memorize all these Window Key + letter commands just to shut down the computer and find the My Documents.
I hung onto win7 till the last possible moment. I don't really miss it but it was a lot more cohesive then 10. Thinking about it i'm increasingly convinced the guys in charge of the taskbar were not on speaking terms with anyone else at Windows and the control panel team all retired or left 6 months before the people designing the settings app arrived.
Just so that you don't accuse me of looking through rose tinted lenses, i think xp looks horrible. Admittedly design has moved on, but i don't remember ever loving it.
I remember it being called "Windows FP" where FP stood for Fischer-Price (maker of colorful plastic toys for babies and toddlers) at the time. Lots of people hated the design of XP after using Win98/2000. I got used to it, but much preferred 7 when it came out. There's a reason why Linux Mint's UI is modeled more or less after the style of Windows 7, not XP or 10.
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
I was recently using an ancient Celeron laptop from like 2006 with Windows Vista, a HDD, and something like 256 MB of RAM, and was blown away by how reasonably performant it was compared to my expectations, especially considering it was a budget laptop in its time.
All that performance is still available with Linux, and it's great. I use plenty of modern systems, but my home desktop is over 12 years old (from the last generation of hardware before everything was locked down) with Debian 13. Turn it on, log in, and the fraction of a second it takes for the login screen to disappear is all it takes for the system to be fully up and running.
Have they fixed that sleep mode thing that doesn't work and drains your laptop battery?
"Modern Standby"? No, they haven't. Just make sure to unplug your laptop before you close the lid and it won't melt down.
This was ~2 years ago, but it didn't work on my side. Closing the lid would put the laptop to sleep then quickly wake it up, fan spinning at full speed even if unplugged. I think I used their diagnosing tool and one cause was some non-microsoft (installed by a driver I think, laptop as almost new) scheduled task, so not fully their fault, but forcing this kind of much weaker/unstable sleep without backup when S3 worked well is a bit crazy to me.
(by the way the laptop was a Framework 13 AMD, curious if others experienced the same. Maybe they fixed it now)
For a long time I had issues with my laptop's battery being dead, even when I put it away fully charged.
Until one day when I unpacked it and found that it was both hot and already running, and decided that this had to end.
I found that there was a process that was part of a printer driver which existed only to spam notifications about buying printer supplies, and that some fucking sadist at HP absolutely buried into Windows as a task that would wake the computer to do this even if it was unplugged.
Because that's what I need in my life: A laptop that wakes up to check the supplies on a printer that I don't even own.
(Thanks, HP.)
The Framework 16 had an issue where the closed lid would flex slightly in your backpack, and press keys on the keyboard, waking up the computer. Ten days ago (Nov 14th), Framework released a BIOS update for the 16 that would turn off the keyboard (and numeric pad) when the lid was closed. I installed that update immediately, and for the first time, when I pulled my laptop out of my backpack after leaving the office and going home (or the reverse), it was still suspended. Had nothing to do with Windows drivers (I run Linux on this laptop), was purely a physical issue.
I haven't checked if the Framework 13 got BIOS updates at the same time. But you could check if the keyboard is causing the wakeup (the Framework 13 has the same keyboard as the 16, but its smaller screen means less flexing in a backpack so it might not be suffering the same issue) by opening a Notepad window before putting the computer to sleep and closing the lid. If you find that random characters have been typed into Notepad while it's sleeping, then the issue was the same that the 16 was experiencing: the keyboard needs to be disabled while the lid is closed. If you don't see random typing with the lid closed, then it's a different issue.
> closed lid would flex slightly in your backpack, and press keys on the keyboard,
FYI: Over time, this repeated pressure + rubbing (especially with dust or grit in between) can leave permanent key-shaped marks or “ghosts” on the screen. Thin laptops and bags that are tightly packed or bulging make this a lot more likely, since there’s less rigidity and more pressure on the lid.
Still not? It's a feature everyone needs i'm assuming lots of people at microsoft own laptops. Mac probably figured it out around the same time as the declaration of independence was drafted.
That one is arguably Intel’s fault. The last few generations of intel macbooks did the same thing, and I had the same issues under Linux (except they were debuggable there, and clearly Intel’s problem).
Apple fixed it by switching to their own processors. MacOS is sliding fast too though. If I leave my MacBook plugged in overnight, it’s toasty in the morning at least half the time.
Not sure how many times it died because it was low at night and I forgot to plug it in, and how many were failed sleeps.
Power Nap or whatever it’s called is disabled.
Windows 7 was peak windows
To me that was Windows 2000. One day in 1999, I was at the local bookstore going over computer magazines and one of them came with CD to preview Windows 2000. I was mostly a Windows 98/RedHat user at that point, so I decided to try it out.
It almost instantly won me over with the leap in stability due to the NT kernel, but the craziest thing was this feature called "Hibernate". This was the time when booting was painfully slow, and here was a feature that not just booted rapidly, but dropped me into the previous session with all apps open! It was pure magic. I switched over to Linux exclusively a few years after that, but this was the feature that prolonged that decision for a long time. I don't think Linux ever got a useable hibernate, but the feature became not as necessary due to the advent of SSDs.
Win7 desktops with W2008 backend was a solid platform with robust ecosystem
They blew it all up with Longhorn/Metro, and have been doubling-down on denial ever since.
Windows 2000 was the last version where Dave Cutler ran the whole show.
There are certainly features in later versions I wouldn't want to live without, but the decay began when he was moved to other products.
windows xp pre uac was a golden age ;)
win98 SE
Peak usability by being able to type a url in to the file manager or a local path in to your browser and have it open in the same window.
Same in Nautilus.
and also peak crashibility. con/con, anyone?
I think you're mistaking Windows millennium for Windows 98 SE
I never got into ME. 98SE was my jam.
While we're down this rabbit hole, my favorite bit was wrapping up the versions of windows: CE, ME, and NT: Windows CEMENT.
I feel this even in the edutainment system of my car. It’s one year old. Actual 1-2 second delays per key just to type in an address in the map. wtf is wrong with the industry now.
> 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.
Microsoft's products have always been just good/cheap enough to gain enough market share to squeeze out others
Excel and Visual Studio, .NET Runtime and C#, Windows 2000 were among the best things for their time. I think there were like 2-3 months in which even internet explorer was the best browser on the market
My operating system teacher was a hardcore Linux zealot and "M$" hater. But one day he praised Microsoft for Active Directory and group policies. Comparable, well integrated easy to use solutions didn't exist at the time. (mid 2000s). Batch scripts were lame though...
Another thing that Microsoft is regressing on. Entra and intune are a poor substitute for Active Directory.
Likewise with SharePoint compared to file shares and NTFS permissions
They also seem to turn a totally blind eye towards the piracy of their OSes for the same reason.
You mean the m3 MacBook Air?
Currently, I do, but mostly I mean whatever last year's generation of Macbook Air is. Since you get the best bang for your buck that way, and there are some incredible deals on the M3 and will likely be on the M4 when it is replaced.
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
The worst part is, there are now two control panels (the other is called "Settings"). Some settings are in both, while others are only in one or the other.
I bet nobody knew/wanted to touch that code.
So they just wrote something worse with less features in React.
Peak web development.
No, they absolutely know. They've been very very slowly migrating stuff over to the new Settings panel bit by bit. If you look at what's in Control Panel now, it's maybe half as much as what used to be in there ten years ago.
That said, it's insanely ridiculous that it's taken 10 years to get it even halfway done.
Yes, and that means that settings in one edition of Win 11 no longer exist in the next one as they rewrite the settings code.
Win11 is mostly written by AI now and it's pretty obvious.
They've been on this road since at least Windows 8, long before AI.
I feel like Windows 7 was the best Windows of all time.
It was fast, stable enough to work for months or years without crashing, secure, didn't need frequent re-installs, didn't need constant cleaning / defragmenting, didn't have (too many) anti-features nobody wanted or used, it just did what you wanted it to do.
It definitely helped that it existed in an era of app monetization through targeted advertising, as opposed to monetization through bloatware, start page hijacking and completely unnecessary toolbars.
8 was when things started going sideways. 10 was not bad, but it already started the "Microsoft knows better" trend, with automatic updates you couldn't turn off and files you couldn't touch, even as administrator. 11 is what it is.
Ditto on legacy of Windows use, and really ‘legacy’ is what it boils down to for me - it’s the devil I know, and you’re a fool if you don’t think MacOS is an angel here - or even whatever -nix flavour you prefer.
It’s been my experience that matter what OS you try to pick up, the most likely case is you mutter “why the fuck do people put up with this” and go back to the one you’re used to, because at least you mostly know the tricks and pitfalls and can get it to do what you want.
Very sleek marketing, but why did they rebrand (the fantastic) KDE Connect to "Zorin Connect"[1]? From the mere <30 commits, I see no reason for the fork, only confused users.
If it was tightly integrated into the OS I could sort of understand not mentioning its name, like you don't want "Foobar Control Panel" and "FizzBuzz Start Menu". But KDE Connect is a standalone app you can install even on Windows. And this is not just hiding the name, it's replacing it!
So, why the "rebrand"[2]? It feels like an attempt at stealing credit.
[1] https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-connect-android and https://github.com/ZorinOS/gnome-shell-extension-zorin-conne...
[2] https://github.com/ZorinOS/zorin-connect-android/issues/19
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?
On the other hand, you've now made it one step harder for people to find the documentation.
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.
Wow, you were not kidding: https://zorin.com/os/pro/
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...
but forking not to confuse users does make sense
Users who are installing a new OS should be able to handle it being called KDE Connect. There's some far too charitable takes in this thread, IMO.
It's a really scummy move by the Zorin people to take FOSS, rename it, and sell access to it.
Oh, such scum! I'm grateful we have the noble giants Microsoft, Google and Meta, who would never use open source code in their commercial products.
> It feels like an attempt at stealing credit.
If it quacks like a duck...
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.
They could get less effort it's they simple use KDE and configure it to mimic Windows or OSX. It isn't necessary to hack Gnome.
They could get more outcome FOR less effort, and that begs a question: is there not a KDE (or Gnome) configuration which explicitly aims to be Windows-10/11 friendly in terms of placement and behaviour of decor and standard CTRL- bindings?
Honestly that's one of the thing where Linux is truly behind other os. Design really need someone to step up, gnome choices are really debatable, kde is great but c'mon.. it's not for beginners or people who just want things to work.
I found that Linux mint desktop environment is the best of both world, zorin a bit behind then everything else.
there is actually nothing complex or hard to understand about KDE. You can navigate your way around as you would with any other piece of software you're new to.
My 8 and 11 year old both use KDE. About 10 minutes and they figured out enough to start a browser and mod Minecraft.
I think the people who have the hardest time are those who think they know what they’re doing so feel they need to change things.
I’ve never seen a beginner at anything start digging through settings wildly, and experienced people know what they want to change. It’s that middle ground.
maybe i'm less smart that your 8 years old, i remember i wanted to switch the bottom bar to the left and the overlay was so cumbersome... i tried a few things and ended up breaking the layout.
It sounds like you fall into that middle ground they were talking about.
I tried KDE Plasma 6.5 on my gaming rig recently and found it quite intuitive. It retains most of the usual keyboard shortcuts and expected behaviors. Granted I'm a "power user" unafraid of dialogs and errors, but I bet my parents could figure it out.
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 the medium is the message here. When I see Arch's home page, I know it will be a hobby OS where there's countless hours of fun in terminal land editing config files. That's how I know it's not for me.
Check out the Debian website. Slicker than it used to be. Still not slick.
I mean, ignoring the fact that it's one example versus a list of examples I posted, I still don't think Debian website is that bad. I remember how it used to be, when it had a link to get the CDs with the distro and the option of getting all the packages in the package manager repository. Debian evolved like everybody else.
To me, and of course this is personal, Debian website looks pretty professional in an enterprise-y kind of way. I quite like it.
But then again, it's one example. Hell, even OpenSUSE's website looks super slick and modern.
> ignoring the fact that it's one example versus a list of examples I posted
It’s the root example, of which many of the examples of your list are derived from. Debian is the daddy.
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/
Unfortunately for microsoft it looks better than windows.
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.
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.
"AI" isn't a verb, and most people don't care to cargo-cult their designs just to appease other members of the cult.
Some people appreciate a nice looking site, they just didn’t have time to spend making it look nice. Now those people have the option of doing that without a huge time commitment, so undoubtedly some of them will.
In English, any noun can be verbed.
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/verbing-nouns/6838872....
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.)
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.
What kind of OS are you calling professional?
Solaris is dying, Irix last release was in 2006, is nowhere to be seen, all that is left is AIX and HP-UX but their available desktops are the very same you find on Linux and the BSDs
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.
> having a bad landing page suggests you really don’t care about the details, and that’s a bad sign.
That depends upon your definition of a good landing page. Personally, I will pay more attention to a Linux distribution if the landing page has information that is valuable to the community. If it looks like they are trying to sell something, I will just move on. In a way, I treat caring about the details as a bad sign (though I realize that I am just prioritizing a different set of details).
Who decides what a "bad" landing page is?
I'd argue many older and more simplistic landing pages look way better than their current equivalents.
> 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.
"Looks like a wiki or a professors web page" is not "bad landing page", it's "aesthetic that is not the mainstream aesthetic". We're not talking about "things don't line up", we're talking about functional.
And frankly, if I see that someone pointedly doesn't vibe-code their landing page, that's a good sign that they're not phoning in the rest of the work, too.
"At least vibe code it, so people know you care about detail"
Do you see the irony there?
If something is a cheap template or just vibe-coded slop, it denotes precisely that someone doesn't care about detail. It's exactly for those style-over-substance people that these tools exist!
That's not to say that a dated, perfunctory, or poor attempt might not suggest a lack of interest in detail itself, or at least a lack of personal insignt for user experience. It could, but vibe coding delivers no cheat around that. It just writes it in big bold letters.
It seems as if Microsoft really put the gun to many people. Many things they don't want in Win11 yet Microsoft does not listen.
Hopefully that will last - Microsoft has caused more than enough damage at this point in time. Quality-wise I feel the new Win-releases are progressively getting worse, less and less caring what users may want.
Why Zorin? It’s always struck me as a weird distro. I can’t put my finger on why, but it feels off.
I wonder how much of a bump other distros have seen in the same period.
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.
So... modern Lindows?
Hopefully it goes better for them than it went for Lindows. Though at least the name isn't lawsuit bait.
Kinda. Lindows didn't resemble Windows as closely as its name might suggest and played with fire with its naming. Ideally this new distro would have a custom built DE made to be as close as possible visually and functionally, yet legally distinct (which a skilled designer can easily pull off) and would not tie the branding to Microsoft or Windows in any way.
microsloth windoze
https://jargondb.org/glossary/microsloth-windows
would probably be even better bait, due to the perjorative, and 2 trademarks being adulterated
what was it? "go make a cup of tea this may take awhile"
That seems almost, but not quite, entirely unrelated to my comment.
> 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.
Funnily enough Zorin used to offer this.
http://web.archive.org/web/2012fw_/zorin-os.com
"Zorin Look Changer" used to "let you select from Windows 7, XP, Vista, Ubuntu Unity, Mac OS X or GNOME 2" themes, whilst newer versions want you to pay nearly $50 for the privilege (although they have significantly reduced their offerings, with their "Windows Classic" theme just being their "Windows-list like" theme with a slightly different start menu).
$50 seems cheap for what they have probably put tons of money into to have consistent theming, in terms of both actual aesthetic and functionally.
I say this as someone getting annoyed daily by KDE inconsistencies over decades.
I have never used Zorin or its theme changer, but I strongly doubt it's much better than what can be accomplished by installing a third party theme, which are never that good and only resemble the mimicked operating systems in the broadest of strokes.
Shrug? Our experiences have been totally different then.
I bought an older version of Zorin, probably 15 or 16, to review for a blog, and I was totally impressed with the consistency of the theming.
To each their own, but Zorin is a cheap on-ramp for people coming from older Windows/Mac and looking for a somewhat apples-to-apples experience of Windows or Mac, with actual updates and not a bunch of ads or telemetry.
Not everyone is a Linux power user
The consistency of the theming isn’t the issue, it’s that it’s just theming (unless I’m just misunderstanding). KDE or GNOME with an XP theme applied settings toggled still acts like KDE or GNOME rather than acting like XP. The resemblance is skin-deep.
Good theming is great to have, but what’s more important is that the user’s prior experience and muscle memory still applies, e.g. the task manager can be summoned in the same ways, settings panels are structured similarly (and aren’t either overflowing or too stripped down like KDE and GNOME, respectively), key shortcuts are the same with no caveats, etc.
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.
> baby's first distro Zorin has a privacy policy and terms of service page, as it's published by a for-profit company.
As though Red Hat and Ubuntu weren't a thing for literal decades.
Distros like Debian and Ubuntu also suffer from issues with compatibility with newer hardware due to their older kernels. This is part of why distros based on Fedora and Fedora Atomic (such as Nobara and Bazzite, respectively) have seen popularity.
Also, gamers at least want the latest drivers. Not the ones from three weeks ago. The latest ones. That's why everyone is recommending Arch-based distros for that purpose. I'm currently on Pop, and waiting months for Mesa updates is no fun.
I find Fedora hits a nice sweet spot between compatibility/updates and random breakage, especially since they backport KDE versions along with kernels.
I have tried Debian, but I found that the software on the main version was out-of-date, and the testing version eventually broke during an update (which is when I abandoned it.) It's not something I'd recommend to a new Linux user.
The question is, do you really need the newer versions? If so, maybe check availability via backports or extrepo.
From my perspective a solid OS that stays out of my way most of the time outweighs the slight disadvantage of working with older software versions. YMMV.
On that I agree. I run Fedora Atomic and I'm not switching to any other non-atomic distro ever again. Once you get used to the papercuts, the old model of overwriting system files and hoping for the best is antiquated to say the least. (And no, I don't care for NixOS, sorry)
I'm still wishing very hard for a serious and battle-tested Arch-based atomic distro, so I can chuck Fedora and its RPM packaging model into the flaming sun.
Stable with back ports works well for me. I have not upgraded to Trixie yet and have 6.12, which handles dev work, Steam, and llama.cpp (ROCm) without issue.
I'm going to have to tap the sign for distrowatch not being a measure of popularity: https://blog.popey.com/2021/01/distrowatch-is-not-a-measure-... A very small number of linux users have ever even heard of distrowatch, much less ever visited it, it's totally irrelevant for anything other than news about distros, which again only a tiny portion of people care about.
But it is amusing when I hear about distros that are "doing numbers" and it's the first I've heard of them. I don't really care about how many downloads, though, what's more interesting is weekly or monthly active users based on unique IP hits to update servers. (Some distros track and publish this.) Recently Bazzite, a distro targeting gamers, hit 31.6k weekly active users, not bad for something only a couple years old. (Over 2 years ago, Ubuntu Desktop was at 6 million monthly active users.)
Smaller distros have more incentive to boost their perceived popularity -- as a Gentoo user I don't really care so much about popularity (and I'm happy to see more Linux adoption in general regardless of distro) but about longevity. But I guess props to Zorin, they've apparently been around as an Ubuntu derivative since 2009 despite this being the first I've heard of them. Yet only two years ago did they get the ability to dist-upgrade, so I wonder wtf they were doing for the prior years: https://blog.zorin.com/2023/07/27/zorin-os-16.3-is-released/
> Rock-solid distros like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora don't have that "cool" factor so noobs don't even consider them
Isn't Ubuntu the first thing a "noob" thinks of when they hear the word "Linux"?
CachyOS is the new cool noob distro, with plenty of footguns so it stays fun
Ten years ago, sure. Judging from their landing page, not any more.
I don't trust Distrowatch's popularity list. I have thought for years it was probably gamed.
There are constantly distros in that top ten list that aren't in other top ten lists like mentions of reddit, mention on Twitter, Google searches for "linux distro", etc.
MX Linux is quite ok. Not sure why it is so highly ranked on distrowatch though.
The distrowatch rankings are based on page views to the distros section on the site. So the distros that lead the rankings tend to be moderately popular distros that link to that page on their site.
The problem is Gnome have really committed themselves to screwing up UI paradigms.
I'd be much less happy with Linux if Cinnamon DE didn't exist because that's essentially a Windows like experience without the BS.
Conversely the default Gnome desktop is awful IMO.
Taskbar, start button and menus all have decades of proven effectiveness, no one needed to mess with them just get the details right (e.g. fonts and interactions).
You know what is proven effective? Not needing to reach for a mouse to interact with taskbar, start button and menus. GNOME is extremely effective as long as you aren't a clicker. If you want to stick to a 30 year old desktop metaphor that's on you but the rest of us have moved on.
Discoverable user interfaces are orthogonal to keyboard interaction efficiency.
Menus are one of the primary ways you can discover keyboard shortcuts.
I often see people praising gnome for it's keyboard efficiency but they are not even 10% as good as macos.
If they cared so much, they would have keyboard shortcut for everything, in every app, with the top bar displaying menu and every shortcut attributed to it, just like macos.
Instead you can use the keyboard to switch an app, close it and so on but once you are working inside, you immediately need to take your mouse. What's the point ? It saves 1 second and confuse lot of beginners.
I'm not sure what you mean - pretty much every modern GNOME application has keyboard shortcuts. In fact they use a consistent keyboard shortcut to bring up the screen that shows all the keyboard shortcuts: ctrl+?
What i mean is that the keyboard shortcut in gnome application is lackluster. there must be a dozen per app, whereas on macos every single function has a keyboard shorcut. Even KDE has more.
It took me a week or so to get used to Gnome, and now I find Windows 11 (and KDE) frustrating!
I like the gnome paradigm. The gnome implementation is bad though. I was promised that xwayland would be the bridge to a glorious future yet stuff like pointer confinement just doesn’t work and their implementation of refresh rate doesn’t play nicely with vscode. So, the reality is I still use KDE even if it’s not quite as visionary.
Same here I switched to Gnome many years ago and even the newest windows and macos desktop feel old and non user-friendly in comparison.
I’ll echo the other commenters who are praising Gnome. It is pretty keyboard-centric. Once you’re used to it, it’s quite nice. I’ve moved on to Niri, and can’t imagine going back to a floating window manager, but between Windows, macOS, and Gnome, I prefer Gnome hands down.
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/
Yes ubuntu,
So, Debian.
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...
Microsoft is forcing win 11 updates with a bunch of AI features nobody asks for or wants.
The new features render millions of windows machines unable to run the new version leaving them ripe for for an upgrade to Linux.
Ironic.. Stay on Windows 10 and risk getting your data stolen through unpatched exploits, or throw away your perfectly good computer and contribute to the climate disaster, get Windows 11, and lose sovereignty over your data to Microsoft...
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 get a 404, this is the correct URL:
https://blog.zorin.com/2025/11/18/test-the-upgrade-from-zori...
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/
No, the link is off. Ether they rename the article or it's an error from HN side.
it seems the link has changed, or corrected, but lands at a "blog" page Re zorin and install instructions. my OP has a couple links direct to the ISO downloads.
they are large files, and move slow. its been the better part of a day and its almost finished downloading for me.
3.5, and 7.5 GB respectively.
https://zorin.com/os/download/18/core/ [3.5GB ISO]
https://zorin.com/os/download/18/education/ [7.5GB ISO]
If people stopped creating weird spinoff distros, which offer zero value except for a preconfigured Desktop, the entire Linux Desktop ecosystem would be in a far better place.
These distros focus on aesthetics choice, but underneath they are always plagued by the same things, tiny maintainer teams completely overwhelmed with the task of managing a distribution. Leading to a great first impression, but an inevitable breakdown in usability.
Every single person would be better served by Kubuntu than Zorin. Simply because Kubuntu has far superior backing behind it.
There are hundreds of these weird distros, targeting different audiences and they are all terrible, because none of them have the actual capabilities of maintaining their distro.
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.
None of these distros economize time. This is not Debian/Arch/Ubuntu with some preconfiguration. Every single user of these distros is in the hands of a tiny number of developers who mostly work on this as a hobby. Things are going to break and they will break in ways nobody will know why, since the base distro does not have these problems.
There is a very good reason why the Arch forums do want reports from arch derivatives, because they are all inevitably broken by their tiny maintainer teams.
Zorin is not a hobby distro. They are a small company that does this for profit. You may like or dislike that, but your assessment is wrong in this case.
> This is not Debian/Arch/Ubuntu with some preconfiguration.
Well yes it is. Zorin is literally based on Ubuntu LTS and their packages are binary compatible.
I think you have a typo. The arch forums don't want reports from arch derivative distros
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.)
I think Kubuntu looks very reasonable and switching KDE themes is as simple as it gets.
Where I think you are right is that it would be very feasible to create a few different builds of e.g. Kubuntu which come with different presets or make those available during installation, with easy switching in the life desktop environment. Maintaining each one should be quite simple, as it is just a few packages, with some configuration on top.
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.
Exactly, you do that by installing Debian with KDE. Not by creating a new distro, which you do not have the resources to properly maintain, which is then perpetually broken in weird ways, which no user can figure out since the base distribution does not have the problems the completely understaffed maintainers introduced.
What all of these distros want to be is a basic configuration script. What they are is a nightmare for every user, since the user is now in the hands of a few people, who as a hobby are maintaining his OS and occasionally will break it.
It is so bizarre that so many people want to make distros, when they are completely unequipped up do so.
Username checks out. Not everyone wants to use Debian stable, with 3 year old packages. And most certainly not everyone wants to use KDE. Choice is what makes the Linux ecosystem great even if it leads to fragmentation. Most distros are created by volunteers, what do you contribute?
It's not like Ubuntu LTS does not provide 3 year old packages as well. Other than that I agree
> Not by creating a new distro, which you do not have the resources to properly maintain
Given the fact said distro is based on Ubuntu LTS there is very little to maintain except a set of themes and desktop customisation and default choices. The long support cycle makes it that the Zorin team is not facing major changes so often as they keep the same Gnome version for a long time. This is a perfectly decent sokution for people who do not feel the need to stay current with the latest version of any given desktop at all time.
You could also ask why XFCE does not use KDE in the background and just work on apps and provide their own KDE theme instead. They can't even make a wayland session in 2025 working so why bother? Or unity, mate, Pantheon from elemenetary os - why don't they just stick to being a theme on top of gnome or KDE and instead focus on the apps?
The answer is the same.
It would be a really huge advantage if there were a really clean way to browse, apply, and (extremely importantly) reverse and remove such a configuration script. I've tried using KDE's customization options to tweak my desktop, and what I found is that I'm very capable of creating the worst desktop I've ever used.
> Having a clean and pleasant user experience on top of a stable Debian based distributed is the goal.
This pretty much describes LMDE[1].
[1] https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
> Having a clean and pleasant user experience on top of a stable Debian based distributed is the goal.
That may be the goal for you personally but it certainly isn't the greater goal of Linux as a whole.
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.
Delighted to see something made in Ireland that didn't come from a multinational... The Zorin brothers have worked on this since they were teenagers. https://stconleths.ie/the-zorin-brothers-technology-for-huma... They were even on the national news a few weeks back!
The pro version comes with "Professional-grade creative suite", but they don't tell you what you're actually getting. It's just opaque corporate-speak one-liners "Make real progress toward your goals".
I’m looking for a replacement OS for my mother in law whose computer is aging out of Windows 10 support. I’m glad to see slick distributions like this trying to fill that gap.
That said her requirements are _so_ simple that Debian with Chromium would probably satisfy 100% of her requirements which are ‘download documents from gmail and print them’.
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.
Snaps make Chromium worse than if on Debian or Mint.
I bought my mom a MacBook Air and put Brave on it. Brave, more than anything, fixed all of her problems (the shitty state of the web). I could have just as easily given her a good Linux laptop, I think.
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.
No I don’t think I’ll spend a minimum of A$999 so she can use chrome and print things.
You can buy a refurbished M1 for half that, and it will be the best computer she ever had.
Sounds like they're on the market for a new OS, not a new computer, which I think is the situation a lot of Windows 10 users are finding themselves in.
An iPad with a keyboard folio is generally even better for these kind of users. They can do everything they want and need, and the OS is uncomplicated. And of course never breaks.
I've been using Ubuntu for 3 years now, and now that I'm about to upgrade my 13 y.o. laptop, there's a dilemma for me between choosing some top(ish)-spec x86_64 laptop or macbook pro M4.
The former just keeps me going with Ubuntu, but forces to still dual-boot Windows for some creative software I use that Ubuntu lacks (a certain DAW and a CAD modeller). The latter gives me an awesome (or so it seems) OS that is much closer in spirit to Ubuntu than to Windows and supports everything I need, but leaves me vendor-locked to whatever user-hostile directions Apple might take in the future.
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.
Thanks, I appreciate your feedback!
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 :)
Oh, thank you very much for chiming in! That twist on Asahi x M3+ was interesting - is that because something wasn't ported yet and the support will be there one day, or there'll be a hard block for Asahi forever for M3+?
From what I understood, the CPUs are different and need work for them to be supported. There is no hard block, but sadly, two key people resigned from the Asahi Linux team. I am not even sure if there is someone even trying to work on this.
Another example is microphone support on M2 series that's not there yet.
Many issues with Asahi are also that there is an incompatibility in page sizes (16k on MX vs 4k on most CPUs), and combined with the usage of ARM, software compatibility is an actual problem if you want to use VMs, DAW software (nothing will work there except Reaper ...) (Maybe this paragraph was a bit ranty, but I'm actually very glad we got Asahi in the first place. It's my daily driver and I'm relatively happy with it)
TL;DR: no hard blocker but there is a people "problem"
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.
Thanks for sharing your opinion!
Be careful, your laptop battery life might drop off a cliff. A lot of laptop manufacturers have tightly coupled power integrations with Windows.
How many came from AWS, Azure and GCP IPs? ;)
Seriously though, a per-country breakdown would've been very interesting to see.
Who would run Windows on AWS? I know some companies do, but it's like 0.01% of all Windows machines.
The implication is that it's a lot of bots using a common user-agent string.
Linux fans are like Charlie Brown with the football every time some new distro claims to be starting to eat MS’s market share.
Probably gonna have to explain this for folks unfamiliar with Charlie Brown.
I know and it makes me sad that that exists. I had the thought as I wrote it, do kids these days know the Peanuts?
And I bet even more have downloaded Linux Mint tbh!
I have a long history with ZorinOS, and I will make it very short.
They are grifters.
The simple fact is that they release open source software, much of which is licensed as GPL. They modify these programs from time to time to be compatible with ZorinOS, etc.
They refuse to release any of their sources sometimes, and when they do, they put takedowns and ban people from their community because they believe their paid-for ISOs are closed-source - which is not true.
If you think I'm wrong, mistaken, lying, etc. grab any ZorinOS ISO and go put it on a ZorinOS community website, such as Reddit and sit back and watch.
It's worth mentioning I find all of the ZorinOS downloads using DHT scan. I haven't touched them in a while, but I still find the entire situation perplexing. I have to imagine part of this issue is that the Chinese community is newer to FOSS and doesn't understand these longstanding ideas.
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.
I'm not claiming that any specific companies are registered in China or operate from China. It's possible that because many Chinese users are using Zorin this is why their community has taken a different stance on free/open software licensing.
EDIT: Either way, my main point is that Zorin is responsible for how they redistribute the source code and other modifications to the software they sell. They refuse to do that sometimes, and they gaslight their community / the open source community.
As a unix/x-windows user in the 90s I grew to hate M$ and longed for a time when they would get displaced.
Thanks to their cooperation, the Year of the Linux Desktop really has finally arrived.
Anyone remember Lycoris? https://deadlinux.fandom.com/wiki/Lycoris
I never used it and had to look it up, but this post reminds of it. I think they might've charged for it also.
Here's a review thread from 2002 slashdot... https://linux.slashdot.org/story/02/03/18/1916248/lycoris-de....
So what is it? Ubuntu with KDE?
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.
Isn't that redundant?
It is Ubuntu based and the website looks amazing and it markets itself as a Windows replacement.
Good skills. It will probably manage to Secure Boot and run, say, ESET (handy for audit points in the enterprise world).
Could it be? Could 2026 be the year of linux on the desktop?
lol
Did we learn nothing from "A View to a Kill" ?
Apart from the UI layer, is there anything else that differentiates Zorin from Ubuntu or even Debian.
One thing that's important but rarely mentioned in discussions like these is how many Windows users even have experience working on unix systems these days? I feel like they are in for a rude awakening if they assume every OS is like windows
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.
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.
Sad if that is really the outcome of decades of computing.
What, normalizing being able to access the entire world of knowledge and cultural information, and talk to family and loved one's easily and at any distance?
I know right. Absolute travesty. Come on grandpa, why aren't you programming?
I don't see that it needs to be any more of a rude awakening than when os x went BSD.
very good, but no thanks, I'd rather use the state of the art M series mac chips with polished MacOS
So copying apple works. OS 18 with mountains in the background. I think this is why Apple pulled a 26.
And how many people are running Zorin?
Sign of the times. It’s just some gift wrapped Ubuntu.
As someone who refused to "upgrade" to Vista 15+ years ago and has been using GNU/Linux ever since I'm absolutely amazed by people's tolerance. What took you people so long? I've had 15 years of freedom and joy. But I'm glad more people are finally seeing the light.