!rant

has anyone used or heard off Zorin Os before? Debian based but feels much like Windows.

i have used ubuntu / mint in the pass but nothing really kept me there.

As a windows person by default, trying to find a distro that’s somewhere in between seems to be a difficult task.

The whole blue theme out of the box is a bit over bearing but otherwise it’s a good step initially to the linux side.

I've used it before when I was on a distro hunt. I think it's intentionally designed to be like Windows in order to make an easy transition to a Linux based system.

The problem with such distributions is, that they will disappear over night and then you're left to yourself and have to switch to something else to be up to date.

It would be better if those guys would make HowTo's and tools to make it easy for normale user to change the standard distributions to be like that, and keep that up to date. Or even better, contribute to the big distributions so anyone can easily change them out-of-the-box to be like that.

@ddephor Zorin's been around for years

looking at these guys specifically, they dont appear to be the one night stand type.

Maybe it's just me, but if you want something like Windows why don't you use Windows?

What is the GUI called? Can it be easily setup on vanilla Debian?

Use KDE, best DE :P

Uses it on my laptop for a while, accidentally uninstalled Python which bricked the os and since i didn't really like it that much I just installed a new distro :P

That's one thing I always thought was interesting, let's use Linux but find one that looks like Windors.

@jstodberg it helps transitioning from windows since you don't have to learn a whole new layout.

It's actually based on Ubuntu not directly on Debian, and yes it's a pretty popular distro and currently ranking just above elementary os on distrowatch.

You should definitely give elementary os a try, a great windows/OS X alternative and great for n00bs ;)
https://elementary.io/
P.S it's free just click on custom and enter zero to download the iso (1.26 GB not 1.36)

@milkybarkid Existing a few years doesn't mean that it cannot be discontinued suddenly. So many, sometimes even big distributions literally vanished over night.

And if it's based on Ubuntu, why not provide some kind of "installer" that sets up a vanilla Ubuntu to be like that?

It's one of the distros I looked at when I first made the switch. I didn't like it because it "didn't look Windows enough" for me. Turns out I really didn't need that, now I'm running arch Linux with ratpoison.

@ddephor Well it seems to have a strong following so I would imagine that if was to be discontinued, users would know in advance