Bonum Certa Men Certa

We Need Community-Run Distros

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 27, 2025,
updated Nov 27, 2025

Custom House In Dublin

There have been very many articles so far about Zorin OS 18 "Hit[ting] 1 Million Downloads in Just One Month" with "780,000 Windows users download[ing]" it, one might assume to replace Windows.

Zorin (or Zorin OS) isn't so well known, but it's also not obscure, it's another Irish distro like Linux Mint (also based on the same "template"). It has received a lot of media recognition lately and some slopfarms created fake articles about it in recent hours, e.g.:

Windows 10 End Spurs Zorin OS Surge: Million Downloads from Ex-Users

According to analytics.usa.gov, this past week only 12.6% of all sessions were Vista 11 and, as we said yesterday, 1) this is the only version of Windows still supported; 2) this coming summer it turns 5. It isn't new.

Windows is in trouble!

It seems rather certain that GNU/Linux, both on desktops and on laptops, will flourish and grow (in terms of adoption or "userbase" as they like to call it), but seeing that features are being removed because of decisions made by IBM - a buzzwords vendor - we really need community-led or grassroots-like distros.

Zorin OS might be one of them. Zorin OS is based on Debian and its latest release uses xorg-server 21.1.12 (yes, there are still new releases of xorg-server). According to its official Web site, it only requires 2 GB of RAM and 1 GHz Dual Core processor. 800 × 600 resolution is still doable and, unlike Fedora, it won't force you to adopt UEFI. So even computers older than 20 years can probably cope.

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