Summary
- ZorinOS feels polished and modern, with smooth UI, rounded design, and thoughtful details.
- Windows users feel at home: familiar taskbar, start menu, snap layouts, unified settings.
- Installs fast, works out of the box; NVIDIA-ready installer and an app store with Flatpak/Snap support.
Microsoft dropping support for Windows 10 has left a lot of perfectly good hardware in limbo just because it doesn’t meet the requirements for Windows 11. Naturally, people are reluctant to let Microsoft turn their functional computers into e-waste, so they’re switching over to Linux. One Linux distribution in particular has seen a surprising uptick in users, ZorinOS. Just a month after its latest version released, it was downloaded over a million times. According to ZorinOS developers, almost 800,000 of those downloads came from Windows users. Windows 10 users are clearly flocking to this distro, so I installed it to see what the appeal is. Turns out, it’s the perfect replacement.
A lot of time and effort went into polishing every detail of this OS
I’ve tested dozens upon dozens of Linux distributions, both mainstream and fringe ones. Often it feels like the distro was ‘hacked’ together, so the experience doesn’t feel cohesive either. It’s hard to pin it down exactly. It may be an inconsistent design language, poor animations, or janky interface choices. The point is that often they don’t feel ‘finished.’
The first thing that jumped out at me, as soon as I logged in, was just how polished everything was. A lot of thought and care went into the UI/UX choices and it shows. There’s a beautiful and clear design language at work here. You’ll see rounded corners, translucency, and beautiful icons everywhere. The animations are incredibly responsive and smoothly tie the whole thing together.
You might also notice little details like alt text explaining what a tool does as you hover over an app or utility. I especially love the choice of displaying notifications in a shade that drops in from the top. It’s similar to how you would receive notifications on the phone. There’s a shortcut on the taskbar system tray for quickly capturing screenshots. The screenshot tool itself is beautiful and easy to use. Much better than the Windows alternative.
ZorinOS is well-made and solid. In terms of UI/UX quality, it feels a lot like a good version of macOS or a fresh, modern take on Linux Mint.
Windows users will feel at home in ZorinOS
If you’re coming from Windows, and you’ve never used Linux before, you’ll feel right at home with ZorinOS. Everything should be where you’re used to seeing it. There’s a taskbar at the bottom which feels oddly familiar. It has a start button, shortcuts, active apps, a system tray, a notification shade (with a calendar and quick toggles), and time and date. It’s almost a one-to-one replica of the Windows taskbar buttons. You can even right-click on the taskbar to open the resource monitor, which is this operating system’s version of the Task Manager.
The start button launches a menu that feels just like the Windows 7 or Windows XP start menu. There’s a search bar and two panels to divide apps and folder shortcuts. The apps are split into categories, complete with an ‘All Apps’ launcher.
You can right-click on the desktop to add icons to the desktop, launch settings, change the background, or create new folders and files. Dragging a window to the top reveals different window layouts that you can instantly snap onto. It’s the same feature you’ll find in Windows 11. You can move between different virtual desktops (ZorinOS calls them workspaces) by pressing the pill icon on the taskbar.
Windows settings are scattered between legacy and modern menus. Even the new settings app feels cluttered and unwieldy. ZorinOS is the opposite. It has a single, unified settings app, much like the macOS settings app.
At the same time, it doesn’t have any of the bloat, ads and AI companions that are jammed into Windows. It doesn’t feel like a billboard. It feels like it’s yours. You can update the operating system when you want to, not when Microsoft wants. There is no forced OneDrive or cloud integration either. In a lot of ways, it feels like returning to Windows 7.
The software support is amazing
I imagine it’s hard to decide what software to bundle with your operating system. It’s probably easy to overcompensate and add bloatware, as we see on Windows. At the same time, you can take too minimalist an approach and alienate new users who find themselves scrambling to install an app whenever they need to do something basic. ZorinOS balances it so well.
When I was trying to install the OS, there was a dedicated entry for installing a version of ZorinOS built specifically for machines with NVIDIA GPUs. Linux machines can sometimes run into trouble when trying to load NVIDIA drivers, which could put off a new user coming from Windows. So the developers made it easy to install ZorinOS on machines with NVIDIA graphics.
The installation was dead simple. Just point and click your way into a working OS in five minutes. The installer also gives you the option to install ZorinOS side-by-side with Windows, if it detects it on your system.
After installing the OS, everything worked just out of the box. I didn’t even feel the need to configure the settings because the defaults were already pretty decent. I did change the themes and wallpapers, but that’s about it. It’s ready to go out of the box.
Browsing through the app selection, I noticed that every single utility that a new user might need is already provided. There’s also a software store where you can download apps with a single click, just like on the Microsoft Store. It hosts Flatpaks and Snap packages, so the library is plenty extensive. Most people will probably never need to touch the terminal to get software.
Linux enthusiasts and hobbyists probably won’t like it as their main OS because it makes all the choices for the user, so there isn’t a lot left to customize. I think that’s a good thing because ZorinOS isn’t meant for those enthusiasts. It feels like Linux done right, as far as a commercial operating system goes.
