Zorin OS 18 Broke Download Records on Windows 10 EOL Day

Windows 10 support ended on October 14, and Zorin OS 18 launched the same day a canny piece of timing that has paid off for the Ubuntu-based distro.ro.

In a post shared to its X/Twitter account, Zorin Group (the company who maintain the distro) say their latest release had passed 100,000 downloads in just over 2 days making the “biggest launch ever”.

More tellingly: over 72 percent of downloads came from Windows users. It seems the company’s months-long promotional pitch to persuade users to try Zorin rather than toss their perfectly capable PC on the e-waste heap has paid off.

Microsoft’s decision to arbitrarily lock users out of running Windows 11 by mandating TPM 2.0 and specific CPU series is annoying enough, but the move is likely to create a mountain of e-waste from businesses, educators and other groups.

A carrot has been dangled in the form of Windows 10 Extended Support Updates. But at ~$33 per device for a few years of scatter-shot security patches, it’s a meh choice: pay to upgrade now, or pay to stay and pay to upgrade later.

No wonder that Linux distributions like Zorin OS (among others) now look appealing to the kinds of users who’d previously “lol, no” at the idea of switching to it. We can thank Microsoft for making free software feel less like an ideological choice and more of a rational one!

Thank Microsoft for making free software look less of an ideological choice and more of a rational one!

Of course, Zorin OS 18 is front-loaded with features designed to woo Windows escapees, including an expanded Windows application detection database, OneDrive access sin the file manager, and a new Web Apps tool to fill any app-gaps.

Will those users stick around for good? I’d like to think so. Zorin OS is based around GNOME Shell and GNOME Shell is designed to be user-friendly (to a fault, some argue) and low-friction as possible, while its Ubuntu LTS base is solid, reliable and gets ongoing support.

More broadly, it remains to be seen how much impact the ‘death’ of Windows 10 will have on computing choices.

Stats from one analytics company say Windows 11 marketshare finally overtook Windows 10 in June 2025, though the latter continues to make up over 40 percent of active Windows installs worldwide (when Windows 8.1 support ended its user base was in single digits).

But if even a small fraction of the current Windows 10 user base switched to Linux, Linux marketshare will rise markedly, as will the open source community as a whole. In fact, there’s an African philosophical concept that means ‘I am because we are’…