Being Ubuntu based, I really think Zorin should be combining efforts with Linux Mint. There is quite a bit of work duplicated here. IMO Mint is the prime project; I prefer an ideal form of the core OS to a facade of others. Mint's choices have, as a side-effect, made it rather familiar anyways.
Clement Lefevbre is French, and Artyom and Kyrill Zorin are Ukrainian, although they grew up in Dublin. I met them and had lunch with them. They sound like it. :-)
The big difference is that Mint is free and runs on donations; the premium Zorin OS edition is paid-for and had paid support.
I can't see how the business models would combine. But, apart from that, I think you're right.
Both have an Xfce edition, and in Zorin's case, it's free.
Mint's flagship has a fork of GNOME 3 called Cinnamon. Zorin uses real upstream GNOME, but with pre-installed GNOME extensions to recreate a Windows-like desktop. Zorin sponsors Dash-to-Panel, and was involved in the original fork from Dash-to-Dock. It also uses Arc menu and a bunch of other extensions, and they're on Github, but they're not in the GNOME extensions store.
And there's also GNOME Flashback, which is a separate Windows-like desktop based on GNOME $Current tech, but maintained by the GNOME team.
There must be some way to combine these things and make a better experience with the combined efforts, but none of the three companies wants it.
