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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.)
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.
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.
