Concerned about the long-term future of Zorin OS

We understand how important this issue is, so I wanted to take the time and effort to write an appropriately thorough and considered post to address the questions that were raised. We owe it to the community.

Our mission from the very start was to make it easier for people to switch to Linux by creating the best and most user-friendly OS we can. That’s the north star that underpins every decision we’ve made. That’s what makes Zorin OS, Zorin OS.

We introduced the Lite edition with Zorin OS 4 (in 2010) to expand the scope of our mission to include users of older and lower-spec computers. It was always intended as a streamlined edition of Zorin OS. To fulfil that purpose, it made sense to select a desktop environment that had a suitable balance of just enough functionality and resource efficiency. It might not have all the features, details, and polish that users come to expect from the Core edition, but enough to provide a good experience on limited hardware.

Fast forward to today, I want to communicate the full context of how and why the decision to eventually sunset the Lite edition in 2029 came about:

As a slower-moving project, XFCE (the desktop environment that powers the Lite edition today) is missing an increasing amount of table-stakes features and hardware support that users come to expect and – by our level of standards – should be present in a modern desktop. We’ve had to spend additional time and resources integrating & developing features like taskbar window previews and location privacy controls for the Zorin OS Lite desktop, just to name a few. This additional complexity stacked on top of the base desktop takes additional system resources. We’ve already been hearing feedback in recent years about how Zorin OS Lite is becoming the heaviest XFCE desktop distro, mainly because of these additions.

More significantly, support is less than ideal for hardware features on modern computers, such as high-resolution displays, fingerprint readers, and multi-touch for example. As newer computers age over the coming years, supporting these hardware features in the Lite edition will get more and more important, especially by 2029. We’ve already heard from some frustrated users that – because of some of these missing features in Lite – they’re going back to Windows. If the OS doesn’t just work for new users like this, we’re not delivering on our goal to provide the best and most user-friendly OS for newcomers to Linux. That's a failure in our book.

If we were to continue down our previous path while remedying this situation, we would likely have to implement this hardware support in the Lite desktop and maintain it ourselves over the long term. This would take our time away from working on the features and improvements our users request, slowing down the overall development cycle further. Worst of all, the additional complexity and background services powering these features would take even more system resources as time goes on, preventing us from delivering on our promise to provide a smooth and polished user experience.

At the same time, the desktop environment in the non-Lite editions of Zorin OS is continuously getting improvements – both from upstream and downstream – in the form of support for more hardware features and performance enhancements. For example, even last week we published several software updates in Zorin OS 17 which should further improve the robustness and performance of the desktop. We developed these updates in hand with some community members that we reached out to who reported some issues previously. The Zorin OS 17.1 .isos – available for download on our website – have also been refreshed with these updates pre-installed to provide the best possible experience to new users out of the box.

More importantly, focusing on this desktop - with its more extensible foundation - allows us to implement the many new features our users regularly request and provides a platform where we can iterate and improve Zorin OS further and faster, for the benefit of the whole community.

With this desktop, we’re able to provide an experience that comes closer to our vision of the desktop than what we can deliver with other desktop environments. An experience aimed at newcomers and built with the user community’s wide-ranging feedback in mind.

In short, if the trend were to continue, the Lite edition is likely to get heavier as the table-stakes features and hardware support get added to the desktop, while the non-Lite editions would get even more performant. Meanwhile, we would have to take our time and resources away from developing the new features that users request, and put them toward catching up and implementing the table-stakes features on the Lite desktop which are already available in the non-Lite desktop. This would further delay the release cadence.

Speaking of the release cadence, I also want to take this opportunity to speak about this in more depth. We’re aware of the dissatisfaction some users have expressed with how long it took to release Zorin OS 17. I agree that it took a lot longer than expected and that we should improve in the future. Without getting into too many details here, the largest reason was that we experienced a significant amount of delays with developing the release upgrader (our most requested feature since the very beginning of the Zorin OS project) which ate into the planned Zorin OS 17 development schedule.

Due to the nature of software development, things often take longer than initially expected and are difficult to accurately estimate timelines for. There's always the trade-off between timeliness and the quality of the end product, but our policy has always been to err on the side of releasing when ready rather than putting out a substandard product quickly. That’s why we took our time with the upgrader and Zorin OS 17; to get them right.

Nevertheless, we’re always striving to improve our products and how we deliver them. Moving to a more timely release cadence was the single biggest request we’ve heard from the community since the release of Zorin OS 17 and this is something we want to improve in our next releases, but not by compromising on quality. Given the constraints we have on time, resources, and all of our other behind-the-scenes obligations to keep the Zorin OS project running (@Aravisian this is something we’ve communicated in the past), we have to make a trade-off somewhere to be able to deliver what the users want most.

With such an important decision, we had to go back to the very roots of what makes Zorin OS, Zorin OS, and think about what we’re trying to put out into the world. What makes Zorin OS uniquely valuable to the users? After a lot of thought and deliberation, we decided to eventually sunset the Lite edition for the reasons I detailed above, as well as the others we communicated on the Lite page here. It was a difficult decision to make, given the amount of effort and toil we put into Zorin OS Lite throughout the years and the code contributions we made to the upstream XFCE community. At the same time, failing to make a difficult decision like this could cause even bigger difficulties and risks to the future of the Zorin OS project, affecting the entire community in the long term.

Over the past 15+ years of Zorin OS's existence, we've seen many Linux distros and other projects come and go. When studying why these projects failed, a common theme we found was that their leaders weren't always able to make the difficult decisions to focus on the most important tasks to keep the project going. They spread themselves too thin and took on too many obligations to the point that they lost their original focus and got overwhelmed, and subsequently quit when it all became too much. Being aware of this grave risk, we have to constantly ask ourselves the question: is what we’re working on the best way to achieve our vision to create the best and most user-friendly OS for newcomers to Linux? This has been our core principle from the very beginning and is what has guided our decisions to bring the Zorin OS project to where it is today.

I understand that this announcement about the Lite edition might be disheartening to some here. However, I want to make it clear to address some of the confusion that I’ve seen: nothing is tangibly changing about the Lite edition now, and not for some years from now. We will still take on the work of maintaining the Lite edition during the latest Zorin OS 17 release cycle and another release after that. It will still receive software updates until at least June 2029, nearly the end of this decade. We made this commitment as a consideration for those of you who are accustomed to the Lite edition and want to keep using it. Discontinuing it sooner and with shorter notice would have lightened our workload, but would have caused more stress to the community, which would be inconsiderate and against our user-centric ethos. That’s why we communicated it this early instead.

The Zorin OS project has been the biggest and most important thing I’ve done for most of my life, since the age of 12 when @zorink and I started it. Despite the many challenges and personal sacrifices we’ve made along the way to keep it going, it’s always been meaningful and rewarding for us. Specifically because of how we hear that it’s touched so many people’s lives positively, even if it’s only in a small way. That's what keeps us going, and that's what will keep us improving Zorin OS further for as long as we can.

Onwards and upwards!

25 Likes