Transcription
A large population of Windows users migrated to Linux. Surprisingly, many in this population appears to have migrated to Zoran specifically >> where I've been a Linux guy for like 6 years. And you know, Windows has never had the worst reputation in the public that it has had for for a while now. You know, >> Zoran OS says nearly 1 million downloads after its latest release. Almost 800,000 came from Windows users. Windows users are abandoning Microsoft in massive numbers as Zoran OS explodes in popularity, triggering one of the most unexpected desktop migrations in years. In less than 3 months, over 2 million downloads, the majority from former Windows 10 and 11 users signal that frustration with forced upgrades, hardware restrictions, and AI heavy updates, has reached a boiling point. And the company built by Bill Gates now appears to be facing a growing wave of distrust in real time.
>> Claim to fame is that supposedly its Linux version looks the closest to Windows. And they can also change their look to look close to a Mac as well.
>> Fresh polished. Everything feels intentional. Rounded corners, translucency, clear s icons and smooth animations. Small touches show care. overall text, a top- down notification shade, and a fast simple screenshot tool.
>> This is about Microsoft losing its users trust, and the timing of how it happened is absolutely brutal. The day Windows 10 support ended, Zoran OS 18 launched. Microsoft shut the door, Zoran opened one. Millions of people woke up that morning to a notification telling them their computer was now unsupported. No more security patches. No more updates left exposed. And right there, already waiting, already positioned, already visible, was Zoran OS8. That is not luck. That is a perfectly placed knife.
So, how did Microsoft back its own users into a corner this badly? The clock has run out for Windows 10. No more free updates, no more protection, and millions of PCs suddenly outdated and vulnerable. Some older computers can't upgrade to Windows 11. This essentially leaves millions of Windows 10 users with a choice. Number one, keeping their outdated PC and risk cyber attacks like getting hacked or getting data stolen. Option two, getting a whole new PC.
>> It started with hardware gating. Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0. It requires newer generation CPUs. Millions of computers that work perfectly fine, that run smooth, that have no issues whatsoever, were declared incompatible, not broken, not slow, just incompatible by a rule Microsoft wrote. Then came the psychology of forced upgrades. Either buy new hardware or accept expanded telemetry or get cozy with AI integrations you never asked for, or pay Microsoft for extended security updates that are only temporary anyway. Pay to stay, pay to upgrade, or get out. Microsoft did not nudge its users toward Windows 11. It boxed them in with walls on every side.
>> The main change in Zoran from Ubuntu is that they modified the desktop appearance to closely emulate the look of both a newer Windows and Mac. And while Microsoft was busy building those walls, it was also preaching sustainability and environmental responsibility. That is where things get genuinely embarrassing. Microsoft's generous Windows 10 security extension to 2026, critics say, is a pathetic band-aid for 400 million PCs doomed for the e-waste heap. Meanwhile, in kind of a poetic end for a large portion of developers for the popular game Candy Crush, nothing says thanks for your service like being replaced by the very AI you created. Perfectly functional laptops and desktops, machines with years of life left in them, were effectively declared e-waste by Windows 11's requirements. Think about what that means at scale. millions of working computers being thrown out or shelved not because they failed but because Microsoft drew an artificial line. Zoran OS runs on those machines. No TPM requirement. No CPU gatekeeping. You can take a computer that Windows 11 rejected and have Zoran OS running on it fully within the hour. While Microsoft was talking green, Zoran was actually being green.
If you come from Windows, Zoran feels familiar. Bottom taskbar, start style menu with search and app panels, shortcuts, active apps, system tray, calendar, and quick toggles. Right click the taskbar to open a resource monitor, shake an easy task manager equivalent. The start menu mirrors older Windows layouts, two panels for apps and folders, categories, and an all apps view. New users will recognize where things are immediately. Now, here is where Zoran did something genuinely clever. Something that most Linux distributions have completely failed to do for decades. It made the switch feel familiar. Windows style taskbar. Windows style start menu. Snap layouts. System tray in the exact position you expected. Clean centered UI option. Dark mode with wallpapers that change dynamically. When a Windows user sits down in front of the Zoran OS for the first time, the biggest fear is gone instantly. The fear of having to relearn everything. The fear of feeling lost and frustrated. That fear is the reason most people never tried Linux before. Zoran understood this and built the entire user experience around destroying that barrier. It does not feel like a knockoff. It feels intentional, like someone actually thought about the real human being on the other side of the screen. Microsoft is too busy making you uh talk to your computer, you know, may maybe interact with it agentically. Some of us just want a computer where we can just interact. We want it less bloated and that's pretty much all it comes down to. So for instance, this is Zoran OS and they've apparently said that a million downloads of this system had happened and a lot of it came from the fact that Windows 10 is dead. And while the interface felt familiar, everything underneath was radically different in the best possible way. No built-in advertising. Windows has ads now. Literally inside the operating system inside the start menu inside file explorer. Zoran has zero. No forced Microsoft account just to use your own computer. No co-pilot shoved into your taskbar. No AI assistant running in the background processing your behavior. No cloud services you have to opt out of one by one. Updates happen when you decide, not when Microsoft decides. This is not a small thing. This is the difference between owning your computer and renting access to it.
>> Zoran looks close enough to Windows that if you're looking for a start button and start menu, it will be where you expect it to be as a Windows user. However, frankly, though the positioning of the system interfaces is close to Windows, it is not some exact copy. It's still Linux. For example, in Windows 11, the app search is at the top of the Start menu. While on Zoran the back button and search are at the bottom. The menu of apps is a completely different format. So you will not confuse this for Windows. It's totally different.
Then people actually installed it. And the last big myth about Linux collapsed. Full installation in minutes. Clickthrough setup. Automatic driver handling. Nvidia drivers included as an option during install. Telemetry opt out presented clearly during setup. No command line, no partition nightmares, no need to watch three tutorial videos before you begin. The erase disk and install option is right there, clearly labeled beginner friendly. The single biggest excuse people used for years that Linux is too hard to install is simply no longer true with Zoran OS 18. A million downloads of this system had happened and a lot of it came from the fact that Windows 10 is dead. For a lot of people, moving up to Windows 11 means either purchasing some new hardware, you know, enabling a more bloated system or really at the end of the day, um, you know, giving up more of their privacy than than they're comfortable with, right?
>> But the real surprise comes after installation. When you try to install software, this is where Zoran quietly humiliates its Linux competition. Click a deb file and a full installer UI appears. No confusion, no weird archive behavior, just a clean installation window like you would expect on any modern OS. Flatpack is the default package format, not Canonicle's controversial snap system. App images work by clicking them, accepting a permission prompt, and running. That is it. No terminal, no hunting for the libfuse command, no Stack Overflow, just click and run. For normal users who just want to install an app, this level of friction reduction is massive. Most Linux distributions still fail here. Zoran does not. If you believe users deserve better than forced upgrades and silent lockouts, hit like right now and subscribe because we're just getting started.
>> If you click on the settings button from whichever location, it looks exactly like the settings on iuntu. So, it's a short-term thrill of familiarity with Windows, but in the end, it's Linux, but that's not a bad thing because Windows settings and control panel is significantly more complicated than Linux. For everyday tasks, you never need to touch the terminal at all. The App Store handles installations. GUI tools handle updates. You can search for apps instantly without getting a wall of irrelevant web results. This is Linux without having to learn Linux. That used to sound impossible. Zoran made it real. The modern UX layer on top of everything is equally polished. Snap layouts that mirror Windows 11 behavior. Built-in workspaces. Smooth animations that do not feel like they were bolted on as an afterthought. A unified settings panel with no legacy control panel hiding somewhere in the background. Integrated screenshot tool. Clean power modes. It feels modern, but it runs lighter than Windows has in years.
>> You know, for companies like Microsoft that talk a whole lot about carbon [ __ ] neutrality and getting rid of e-waste, well, they're sure as hell are creating a whole lot of e-waste with their most recent software updates.
>> The performance difference is real, and it is not subtle. Lower idle RAM usage than Windows 11. Noticeably snappier on modest hardware. Machines that felt slow and tired on Windows feel responsive again on Zoran. There is no background telemetry dragging on your system resources. No processes you cannot identify or stop running silently in the background. For older hardware especially, this is not just a feature, it is a resurrection. After installation, you have the option to choose a different appearance. And in this case, I stayed on the default Windows style since we are assuming you're coming from Windows. This is the first option in the Azoran appearance. Again, it's not exact. The rest of the menus and settings is standard and looks identical to ibuntu. But the color choices, fonts, and images are nicer than Ubuntu.
>> Gaming deserves an honest answer, though. Proton support works. Some titles run at near Windows parody. Some do not. emulation runs smoothly, but Zoran is a daily desktop operating system first. It is not trying to be a gaming optimized distro. If gaming performance is your absolute top priority, there are more specialized Linux options. That honest reality check is exactly the kind of thing that builds credibility with new users rather than overselling and disappointing them. There is one controversy worth addressing directly. Zoran Pro exists and costs money. It adds extra desktop layout options, some curated pre-installed apps, and direct installation support. The debate is real because many of the apps included in Pro are already free on Linux through other means. Whether the price is justified depends entirely on how much you value convenience versus doing a bit of setup yourself. It is not a scam, but it is not essential either. Thorne made some interesting choices in how it operates and it's subtle but it does make a big difference. The main thing you will notice is that installing apps is a different experience than Zoran and frankly better significantly better. Under the hood Zoran runs on Ubuntu that matters enormously for new users. Ubuntu compatibility means any Ubuntu tutorial you find online works on Zoran. Hardware support is inherited from one of the most tested Linux bases in existence. OpenVPN is builtin. The LTS foundation is rock solid. Think of it as Ubuntu doing all the engineering work under the hood while Zoran builds the experience that actually makes sense to a Windows user on top of it. One real limitation to be aware of. Zoran is a smaller company. For brand new hardware, especially very recent laptop models, there can be a lag before everything works perfectly. Kernel updates follow Ubuntu's LTS schedule, which is not cutting edge. For mainstream hardware that is 2 or more years old, it is excellent for a laptop you bought last month. Give it a few months before switching.
>> This is Zoran OS right here, ladies and gentlemen. So, what does it feel like? What is it like, Muda? How is it the mo how why are a million people downloading it? Well, to start off with, it's got very much a Windows styling to it, like the start menu matches. Everything that you could ever really need, even in the core edition, is pretty much installed from the get- go. The smart move for anyone hesitant is dual boot. The Zoran installer detects Windows automatically and offers a sidebyside setup. You keep Windows. You boot into Zorn. You live there for a few weeks. You realize you never need to go back. You never asked Linux to be a nuclear decision and it does not have to be. Zoom out and look at the bigger picture. Steam hardware surveys show Linux desktop share growing steadily. It is still small, but the trajectory changed. If even 5% of Windows 10 users migrate to Linux, the downstream effects are enormous. Developers start optimizing for Linux. Hardware vendors start certifying Linux compatibility. The ecosystem shifts in ways that accelerate everything further.
>> Bros, because we switch. So yeah, Zorenos 18 didn't just break records. It might be the start of a real shift in how we think about desktop computing.
>> Here is the real story underneath all of this. Microsoft forced hardware upgrades on users who did not need them. Microsoft expanded telemetry on users who did not want it. Microsoft pushed AI integration on users who did not ask for it. Microsoft embedded advertising in an operating system that users paid for. Microsoft made its own long-term customers feel like they were being squeezed from every direction at once. Zoran OS did not steal those users. Microsoft handed them over. For anyone leaving Windows, Zoren OS 18 basically says, "Hey, you don't have to start from scratch." And here's the thing, this isn't just about Zoren. When people realize Linux can be this smooth, it changes how they think about computers.
>> The scale of what Microsoft triggered here is genuinely hard to wrap your head around. Analysts at Canalis ran the numbers and landed on a figure that should embarrass every executive at Microsoft. 240 million PCs. That is 1/5if of every computer on the planet. Declared incompatible, declared unwanted, declared dead. If you stacked all those machines as folded laptops, the pile would reach 600 km higher than the moon. These are not broken computers. They browse the internet fine. They run spreadsheets fine. They do everything their owners need them to do. According to Zoran, the Zorn 18 release has so far surpassed 2 million downloads in 3 months. Microsoft simply drew a line in the sand and said, "Your machine is not welcome anymore. The environmental consequences of that single corporate decision are staggering. Researchers estimate it could generate over a billion pounds of e-waste, lead, mercury, cadmium, all leeching into landfill soil. And while all of this was happening, Microsoft was publicly talking about sustainability. Zoran runs on every single one of those 240 million machines. No exceptions, no asterisks. While Microsoft was sending hardware to the landfill, Zoran was sending it back to life. 2 million downloads may just be the beginning. But is Microsoft even paying attention? Because one thing is certain, the users already