Opensource has a forking problem. So much time spent maintaing projects with only a few tweaks differentiating them.
Mint at least improves upon Ubuntu significantly and undoes a lot of their unpopular corporatey decisions. Zorin is literally just Ubuntu with a different face.
It’s a very beginner-friendly distro, similar in goals to Linux Mint but more modern. It’s stable, comes pre-installed with graphics drivers and important apps like Wine, a custom clean version of Gnome or XFCE, and having a lot of UX improvements like explaining what Wine is the first time you open an exe file, and providing popular alternatives for the app you’re trying to install.
There’s nothing brand new about it, it’s just really solid and I do recommend it as people’s first distro.
Second this. Zorin OS, and Mandriva Linux (before they went bankrupt, and the community picked up development) were my first exposure to Linux over a decade ago, and the ux familiarity really helps a ton.
A lot of the other distros had funny stuff going on with multiple docks, open apps showing in the top dock, others looked like a Stardock Special and it was just a little confusing for younger me lol
This was the first I’d heard of it and from my first impression it seemed like it could be a solid beginner distributor.
Glad to see you do recommend it to beginners. This would probably be easier for my partner to get into compared to Pop!_OS (I’ll be testing this soon though!)
Does it ended? On all distros I know of, Fedora, Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Zorin, we can swap the desktop environments like gloves. The only exception being immutable things like Fedora Kionite, but they are made to be untouchable and for specific users.
Wayland does not change anything there, only that the desktops with less developers must take more time to adapt. What makes desktop interoperable are FreeDesktop standards, which are now in full swing to Wayland.
Yeah I really don’t know what they mean, in the past couple months I’ve used Plasma, Gnome, NsCDE, i3, Sway, Hyprland, Enlightenment, WindowMaker, Mate, Trinity, Xfce, and probably others I forgot
It’s an Ubuntu-derivative using Gnome, but with a large number of tweaks to make it very user friendly out of the box. They have a variety of pre-made layouts in a beautiful theme that can pretty well replicate Windows 7, 10, 11 and Mac layouts among others, as well as a clear option to include Nvidia drivers OOTB in install media, and a better WINE experience for example.
It supports wayland just fine.
In my view it has all the benefits of Mint without many of the drawbacks stemming from its custom DE.
I personally don’t use it, preferring Gentoo or Fedora, but I think it is a very good choice for beginners or those people who only use a computer for web browsing and home office use.
I would definitely recommend installing it in a VM or liveUSB and trying it out. It won me over, when I thought it would just be another themed distro.
“With the new Desktop Cube, you can switch between workspaces in 3D. Your app windows float off the desktop surface with a parallax effect, so you can see behind them,” said the Zorin OS team. “There’s also the new Spatial Window Switcher, which replaces the standard flat Alt+Tab and Super+Tab dialog with a 3D window switcher.”
For anyone unfamiliar with how kernel support works, unless you manually installed your kernel you don’t need to worry about this.
Distros that shipped 6.5 will continue to support 6.5 during their normal release/support cycle and back port any important patches as needed (or they will update their packages to 6.6).
9to5linux.com
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