Zorin OS 18 was released on October 14. Just 48 hours later, the team announced it had already been downloaded 100K times. Now, a month later, they’re reporting an even bigger milestone: Zorin OS 18 has surpassed 1M downloads in its first month.
“We’re thrilled to announce that Zorin OS 18 has amassed 1 million downloads in just over a month since its release, breaking all previous records.”
Also very interesting is the announced information that more than 78 percent of these downloads originated from Windows systems.
While it’s hard to say whether this surge is tied to the end of Windows 10 support, it’s clear that Zorin’s user-friendly approach and polished interface continue to draw more people—especially those looking for a Windows alternative.
So far, so good, but there’s a less pleasant side to the story. Along with celebrating 1 million downloads in a month, the team also announced that the upgrade path from Zorin 17 to 18 is now officially open for testing. And let me be clear right away: don’t try it yet.
Today I made several attempts, and each one failed spectacularly. The upgrade appeared to succeed, but after the reboot, I ended up with this screen.
A quick check shows that similar cases have already been reported on the official Zorin forums. If you didn’t make a backup beforehand, you could easily end up with a broken system. And while Zorin makes it clear that the upgrade is technically possible, it’s still in a testing phase — I’d go even further and call it highly experimental.
With that said, my advice is simple: don’t try it, or at least don’t even think about it without taking a full system snapshot first. Installation via fresh download remains the only reliable method at the moment.
Of course, the expectation is that Zorin’s devs will sort this out soon, giving users a reliable way to perform an in-place upgrade to version 18.
For more details on the 1-million-download milestone and the newly announced test upgrade path (which, at the moment, you should avoid), see the official announcement on Zorin’s blog.
