Zorin OS: From the Hobby Project of Two Teenagers to a Growing Startup

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Zorin OS: From the Hobby Project of Two Teenagers to a Growing Startup

Abhishek Prakash

11 Jan 2023<br>7 min read

Brief: Two teenagers created a Linux distribution 8 years back. Today it has become a prominent name in the Linux world. Read the story of Zorin OS.

The CEO and the co-creator of popular Linux distribution Zorin OS, Artyom Zorin shares a few insights about the project, its goals and its achievements with us. By the way, now you can guess that Zorin OS was named after its creators. I didn’t know that :)

What made you start the Zorin OS project?

The story of Zorin OS began in the summer of 2008 when my brother Kyrill and I first tried Linux. As soon as we booted our CD of Ubuntu 7.10, we were amazed at how much better it was than the traditional desktop operating systems. It made our computer run so much faster, it was far more customizable and flexible, and we didn’t have to worry about getting viruses.

We thought to ourselves "This is better than Windows and Mac in pretty much every way, why isn’t everyone using this?" However, when we showed Linux to our father – who was a regular computer user – it became apparent that Linux wasn’t designed with the general public in mind, as it was difficult to use and the desktop layout was confusing to someone accustomed to Windows or macOS. We saw this as the biggest roadblock to the success of Linux on the desktop, so we decided to solve this problem by creating a distribution with a familiar user interface that adapts to what the user is comfortable with.

The only problem was that we were 12 and 14 years old, and neither of us knew how to develop software. We took this as a challenge and started developing Zorin OS while learning how to program. Nine months later – on 1 July 2009 – we shipped Zorin OS 1.0.

Kyrill and Artyom Zorin in 2010. Picture credit: podcast.ubuntu-uk.org

That’s impressive! But developing a Linux distribution on your own as a teenager must have been difficult. Did you have help from your parents? Do you have other developers working on Zorin OS?

When we started Zorin OS in our early teens there wasn’t any computer science curriculum at our school, so we needed to teach ourselves how to develop software by reading books, watching tutorials on YouTube, and Googling. Our father was a translator and our mother is an artist. While this meant we were the only programmers in the house, our father was instrumental to the inception of Zorin OS. His early experience with Linux served as the inspiration for our project, and his guidance in strategizing our new venture gave us a clear path towards building Zorin OS into what it is today.

After graduating from school and studying Computer Science and Business in university at Trinity College Dublin, we’re now working full time on Zorin OS. We would like to thank our community of users and customers of the Ultimate edition for helping to support our development efforts and making it possible for us to focus purely on making Zorin OS even better.

As an Open Source project, we also receive contributions from other members of the community, both indirectly and as direct code commits to our sub-projects. In times when we need to add more expertise to our team, we hire remote developers on an ad-hoc basis. Over the coming months, we’re planning to expand our core team even further to support the creation of new Zorin OS-related projects.

Kyrill and Artyom Zorin in 2015

What would you recommend to users coming from other OS? And would Zorin OS be the right distribution to start with and why?

Ever since the release of version 1.0, our primary focus when developing Zorin OS was to make it as easy and frictionless as possible to move from traditional systems to start with Linux. If you’re familiar with Windows, you should be able to use Zorin OS right away without having to learn anything new; the start menu and taskbar are right where they were in Windows. We’ve also made it possible to change the desktop layout in a click using Zorin Appearance, so if you’re used to macOS or another operating system you can feel right at home. However, behind all of the desktop refinements and ease-of-use tweaks, you still have access to the power of a full Ubuntu-based Linux distribution in Zorin OS.

Some people do not like that Zorin OS Ultimate is paid. How do you justify putting a price tag on Linux?

The spirit of Free Software is to create technology that is free as in freedom, not "free beer". This allows developers to charge for their work to make it sustainable. The GNU GPL license actually highlights the fact that Free Software can be paid-for.

Even though many Linux-based projects are available for free, a lot of the development work for Linux is actually done by salaried engineers in large companies like Intel, IBM, and (surprisingly) even Microsoft. These companies contribute...