Comment by incanus77
4 days ago
I have been using and administering macOS since 2002 and Linux since 1998. Zorin is my favorite distro when I need to put an OS on a machine and want a cohesive, well-designed, low hassle, free system for myself or others. It’s really well done and truly feels like a unit instead of the many, many disparate parts that it is made of.
Sure, you can do all of the things that it does in more custom ways assembling and using those disparate pieces yourself. Sure, it is probably less efficient on disk space and resources as it uses a variety of software installation approaches including Flatpak. Sure, its Windows compatibility is just Wine. Sure, it’s hard to find info on the main product page about what it’s actually running. None of those things matter when you want a computing system that is polished, free, and lets you start being productive instead of managing your system. If that’s not for you, don’t use it! You’ll be fine.
How does Zorin compare to the likes of Mint?
Not GP but Zorin is still Ubuntu under the hood, the main difference is that they really made a lot of Design decisions that are biased towards usability, specially for non-technical people (at arguably the expense of some Free Software principles).
The other more aesthetical aspect is that at least with Zorin 17 they really mimic Windows in a positive way, in that they leverage the 'muscle memory' of non-technical users.
My experience putting it on other people's laptops is that they just intuitively know where to find things because of how the DE is analogue to what they are already familiar with.