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1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

blog.zorin.com

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Re: 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

#201

Post by FridayoLeary »

rmunn wrote: post #194
FridayoLeary wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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…

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.

Re: 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

#202

Post by makeitdouble »

javier2 wrote: post #161
makeitdouble wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 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.

Re: 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

#203

Post by makeitdouble »

carlosjobim wrote: post #184
makeitdouble wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

#204

Post by miki123211 »

Narishma wrote: post #153
chneu wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

#205

Post by fragmede »

makeitdouble wrote: post #203
carlosjobim wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

#206

Post by Jach »

sph wrote: post #12
christophilus wrote: post #4

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.

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…

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/

Re: 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

#207

Post by GeekyBear »

makeitdouble wrote: post #192
GeekyBear wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

#208

Post by 7thaccount »

api wrote: post #74
Someone1234 wrote: post #60

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 fantast…

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 prev…

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?

Re: 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

#209

Post by makeitdouble »

fragmede wrote: post #205
makeitdouble wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: 1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18

#210

Post by 7thaccount »

idiotsecant wrote: post #140
api wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prev…

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.
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