＃A Brief Review of Zorin OS 18

Zorin OS must have some capable marketers, because its website seems distinctly designed to leave visitors with the impression that it is something other than or more than Linux. I guess as Linux has become ever more capable and easy-to-use, it was inevitable that some organization would try to jump in and take credit for inventing it, just as Steve Jobs tried to do with the smart phone in 2007, a full two years after the first usable smart phones appeared on the market. Some people just have far too much audacity, and we naively label them "good marketers", rather than what they are, successful credit grabbers.

Having, I think, appropriately blasted Zorin's marketers, I will now spend the remainder of this review talking about the mostly favorable impression the distribution has made on me.

I first tried Zorin 9 "Lite" years ago. I don't remember what year exactly, but it was probably 2014. I really liked it, especially thanks to its multimedia codecs, because as I recall, it was the first Linux distribution that would play a movie and music well "out of the box" on all of my hardware without me having to suffer through the installation of additional libraries or video software. It just worked, like Linux is supposed to. I stopped being impressed when the developers removed the codecs at a time when Linux developers in general were worried about being sued over having proprietary codecs in their distributions, and I went back to Linux Mint for a few more years. I am not blaming Zorin's developers. I would probably have done the same thing in their position. But they lost me as a user, and I have not tried Zorin again until a few weeks ago.

Several people have praised Zorin lately, so I decided to give it another try on some reasonably old hardware that I use every day. I wanted to know if the accolades it has been receiving are justified. Now that my web application firewall and Blue Dwarf are both working, I appear to have some time on my hands for other things that I have been wanting to get to--you know, fun things, like experimenting with various Linux distros and computer hardware, and maybe playing a video game or two, or perhaps even building some hardware...

I should mention that Zorin is currently available in three versions: Pro, Core, and Education. Core and Education are free, but Pro costs $47.99. I have mixed feelings about developers charging for open-source software, but I don't consider it to be strictly unethical. Some may, so I want to make any readers who are opposed to non-free (as in beer) software aware before they bother reading further.

Zorin is a Debian derivative, so it can potentially support a huge array of free Linux packages. If you don't want to pay for the Pro version, beginning with the Core version and installing all the additional packages to bring it up to the Pro version yourself should be possible. But we are talking Linux and computers here, so one never knows. Just because a logical approach should work does not mean it will.

＃＃Installing Zorin

Zorin's minimum system requirements are comparatively reasonable:

• CPU: 1 GHz Dual Core – Intel/AMD 64-bit processor

• RAM: 2 GB

• Storage: 15 GB (Core), 35 GB (Education), or 45 GB (Pro)

• Display: 800 × 600 resolution

I downloaded Zorin version 18 Core (Zorin-OS-Core-18-64-bit-r3.iso, 3.5 GB), which is a very minimal installation that contains only a few applications. I usually avoid more full-featured versions of Linux distributions, so I don't have to wait for more than an hour for them to be downloaded on my slow Internet connection. In this case, I had the added incentive of not paying $48 for the Pro version.

Zorin's website has detailed installation instructions, so I will not repeat them all in this article. If you are reasonably familiar with Linux, you won't need them anyway.

I first installed Zorin on my Dell Latitude E6430 with a Core i5-3340M CPU and 8 GB of RAM. Instead of using balenaEtcher, I used the following Linux command to create the USB boot drive:

sudo dd if=Zorin-OS-Core-18-64-bit-r3.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M conv=notrunc,noerror status=progress

Don't forget to substitute the correct path to your particular drive into the above command, or you could erase the wrong drive.

During the installation process, the user is given options for upgrading Zorin's system files from the Internet, downloading multimedia drivers (codecs), and choosing how he wants to partition his storage drive. I chose the default partitioning scheme that involved wiping the entire drive and starting over. I had no choice because Gparted would not shrink the size of my laptop's existing Linux Mint partition to free up space for a Zorin partition. Instead, I installed Zorin on a different drive with the default options, which is such a simple process that even someone who has never seen Linux before will likely be able to follow it without any help. When the installation completes, Zorin even displays a reminder on the screen to remove the USB installation drive to prevent accidental booting from it again.

Unfortunately, the first thing I saw when I booted my new Zorin installation (and every time thereafter) were these words across my screen: "Invalid Partition Table!". Having seen this kind of garbage error message before with other Linux distributions, I simply clicked the "enter" key and Zorin booted right up. Developers really have no excuse for allowing this to occur on an operating system they are expecting large numbers of people to use every day.

＃＃Using Zorin

After successfully booting Zorin for the first time, I immediately tried to play some videos. An MP4 file played without problems. As expected, a DVD did not. Even though Zorin prompted me to download software to play the DVD and even pretended to look for it, nothing happened. Next, I went to the command line and typed "sudo apt-get install vlc". VLC successfully downloaded with all its dependencies, including libdvdnav4, but when I tried to play the DVD again, it still would not play. This is the typical result from nearly all modern Linux distributions after any attempt to pay a DVD. With the borderline scandal that has been occurring for years over the degradation in the quality of the content of all major streaming services and the resulting increase in interest in movies on DVD's, one would think Linux developers would be smart enough to recognize the importance of making their distributions play DVD's. Apparently they aren't as smart as many of them think they are.

The only browser that comes with Zorin Core is Brave. A graphical software installer, simply referred to as "software" on the main menu (and on the taskbar), allowed me to find and begin downloading Firefox, but the download progressed so slowly that I canceled it and installed Firefox from the command line using the "Apt" package manager instead. Even from the command line, the 85 MB Firefox 148 file took about 11 minutes to download, so I suspect this is the result of a problem with Zorin's repository, rather than with the graphical software installer. Other packages downloaded quickly, so the languid pace of the Firefox download may have been brought about by too many people trying to install Firefox from the Zorin repository at the same time. Maybe that had something to do with so many people installing Zorin lately.

While waiting for Firefox to download, I attempted to add some icons to the taskbar, only to learn that Zorin provides no obvious way of doing that. That means one can't easily add a mini network activity monitor, memory monitor, or any additional controls. There are, however, ways of doing this with some effort.

An icon for an application also can't be added to the desktop by right clicking on the desktop background and selecting that option from the menu. Although, I didn't initially know how to create icons, I quickly saw that they existed in Zorin, because the menu presented an option for arranging them. I later discovered that selecting "Zorin Appearance" from the right side of the menu brings up a window that allows the addition of icons to the desktop for "home", "trash", mounted volumes, and network servers. Afterwards, icons for mounted volumes appeared automatically whenever I plugged in a USB drive. A quick Internet search revealed that bringing up the menu, right clicking on an application, and selecting "Add to Desktop" put the app's icon on the desktop. If an application does not appear in the menu, creating an icon for it on the desktop involves finding it in Zorin's file manager, dragging it to the desktop, right clicking on the icon, and selecting "Allow Launching".

The "Zorin Appearance" menu item also allows users to change the layout, windows theme, effects (disable animation, etc.), font sizes and types, and a few other settings. Turning off "Advanced Windows Tiling" prevents the very annoying shape and location change of opened windows that occurs whenever the user drags a window near the top center of his display. That is the Zorin feature that annoys me the most. As I was beginning to see, although Zorin's desktop environment works differently that one like MATE, the same results can be achieved in different ways. This will be something anyone transitioning from Windows to Zorin will have to learn just as much as someone transitioning from another Linux distribution with a different desktop environment.

I was able to use "sudo apt-get install" at the command line to install Firefox 148, Lynx, gedit, neofetch, net-tools, gparted, isc-dhcp-client, netdiscover, the Liferea RSS feed reader, whois, and hwinfo without any problems. Some of them appeared automatically in the Zorin menu, but Lynx did not. They all ran without any problems, as did the Lagrange Gemini browser AppImage that I copied over from my personal collection of software.

After installing Neofetch, the command, "neofetch | grep -e DE -e WM" showed that the desktop environment is Gnome 46.0 and the windows manager is Mutter. The Linux command "echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP" yielded a response of "zorin:gnome". I guess that means Zorin Core comes with a version of the Gnome desktop modified specifically for Zorin OS?

When I tried to install yt-dlp and PHP a few days after installing the packages listed above, I had no success because the repository us.archive.ubuntu.com was off line. I tried again a day later and had no problems. This points out something I have been noticing for years. Linux repositories are frequently off line. This can be incredibly annoying, especially when one is not sure whether the problem is being caused by a repository that is temporarily off line or something else. Unreliable repositories is one of the problems that have caused me to be less enthusiastic about Parrot OS lately.

I had no success installing Google's Chrome browser with "sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable". Looking at the /etc/apt/sources.list file showed the reason. Only the "noble" versions of the Ubuntu repositories are included. For those who are not familiar with Ubuntu repositories, well-tested Linux packages that are known to be secure reside in the noble repositories. Less well known, less well tested, and less trusted packages are supplied by the "universe" repositories. In the Linux sources.list.d directory I saw a special Mozilla entry that allows Firefox to be installed. Zorin also appears to have included its own "noble" repository.

I think Chrome not being in the Ubuntu noble repositories is rather strange, but given Zorin's entirely reasonable focus on security, not including the Ubuntu "universe" repositories makes sense. This means you may not be able to install Chrome (and probably other browsers) on your Zorin computer unless you are willing to risk compromising its security by adding some additional repositories to your sources.list file. Many of these probably also come in ".deb" files, which may or may not find the dependencies they need in your Zorin installation. Duckduckgo's AI says, "Google Chrome is not included in Ubuntu's official repositories because it is proprietary software, meaning it is owned by Google and not open-source. Instead, users need to manually add Google's APT repository to install Chrome on Ubuntu." I think I'll pass on that.

Speaking of security, on the closely related topic of privacy, I noticed a statement on Zorin's website, "We believe privacy is a fundamental human right. That's why Zorin OS doesn't collect personal data, so advertisers and governments can't spy on your activity." I don't exactly have the skills to verify whether that claim is true; however, I installed OpenSnitch and saw what I considered to be too many programs trying to connect to the Internet. I chose to block "gnome-software", Firefox's pingsender, Snapd, "colord-sane", the Avahi daemon, cups-browsed, the Network Manger (which I have seen to be a network bandwidth hog on other Linux installations), and fwupdmgr. Will this bite me later? Perhaps, but my preference is to manually control and update Linux and its packages on my machines with "sudo apt-get update" and "sudo apt-get upgrade" as I see fit, rather than allowing Linux to update itself whenever it sees fit. This is especially true, given that Zorin is not a rolling release, so I should not expect to have to rely on it updating itself nearly every day. That is just too much like Microsoft Windows behavior for me, and I hate that Linux seems to be following Microsoft's lead in so many ways. I realize less knowledgeable Linux users may want automatic updates, but I don't need them.

I spent a week with Zorin on my Dell Latitude, and one thing I noticed was that it is noticeably faster than the Linux Mint 22 that I had been running. Even with animations and transparency turned on, its response was snappy without the annoying lags I had noticed in Mint after a couple of months of operation when bringing up a directory with more than about 40 or 50 files and sub-directories. This surprised me because I remembered trying the non-Lite version of Zorin years before, and that was definitely not how it was then. For the benefit of those who may not know, the regular (slow) version of Zorin and the "Lite" version have been merged together. I am fine with that, since I would never have used the regular version anyway.

With this in mind, I decided to try Zorin on an older slower machine that has begun showing its age with other Linux distributions. By that, I mean almost no Linux developers are still producing distributions that will run on it. I installed Zorin on my 2008 Lenovo Thinkpad T500 with a Core 2 Duo P8600 and 6 GB of RAM. The error message "Invalid Partition Table!" was absent when booting on this machine. To my surprise, even with animations active, Zorin was still responsive. Ordinarily, it ran without annoying lags of any kind. The exception was when surfing the Internet in Firefox 148, and that is Firefox's fault, not Zorin's. I noticed no other problems at all using Zorin on this machine until a day or two ago. At that point, windows and applications began occasionally closing on their own and the display began freezing for as long as 10 seconds before resuming. This seemed to be associated with the Tor or Firefox browsers. This is something I will continue monitoring as I test Zorin for a longer period of time.

I would have tried Zorin on an even older laptop, but it does not come in a 32-bit version. That is a shame, because I think it may have run well enough that I may have wanted to install it on most of my 32-bit laptops manufactured between 2002 and 2008.

＃＃Final Words

Despite Zorin's somewhat misleading marketing, I intend to test it for several more months. If it continues to perform well, it may become my new favorite Linux distribution. This is especially true, given the fact that it runs on my Thinkpad, on which I had previously resigned myself to running AntiX Linux. I don't particularly care for the AntiX desktop environments, so the prospect of perhaps being able to use Zorin for a few years on my Thinkpad means I can more easily switch back to that laptop as one of the two machines I use daily. That makes me happy because my Thinkpad is probably my favorite laptop.

I have on many occasions very heavily criticized the developers of other Linux distributions for refusing to make their distributions run on older computers, so I want to especially thank the Zorin developers for making it possible for me to perhaps enjoy using my Thinkpad for a few more years. I think that alone is enough for Zorin to deserve a good review from me--although given the Cheapskate's Guide's declining readership, thanks mostly to the transition of Internet users away from search engines and to AI that is affecting all blogs, I doubt most Linux developers care what I write about their distributions.

As I mentioned above, another reason for personally considering switching to Zorin is that I have noticed Mint 22's responsiveness declining slightly over a couple of months of use--not so much that I would discourage people from using it who are transitioning from Windows, but enough that I noticed. I think users of Windows have been conditioned to think that sluggish computers are just a fact of life, but as one who has used many computers and operating systems going all the way back into the 1980's, and as someone who writes my own code for my websites, I know that developers choose to create slow software. If users refused to use slow applications, their speed would increase. It is that simple.

I also still like Parrot OS, despite its way of refusing to allow more software to be installed when the developers periodically switch security keys for its repositories without somehow making that blatantly obvious to current users. I find highly annoying having to spend the better part of an hour looking up how to switch to the newest keys. I may be biased, but I consider security keys for software to be one of many examples of security theater that we are all increasingly forced to suffer through in order to continue living under the delusion that our software is secure. Here is a news flash for you if you haven't already accepted the reality of the situation. Our software is not secure. Like other distributions, Parrot OS can also become unstable as one installs more packages. Hopefully, neither of these problems will arise with Zorin, but that is one thing I will be testing for over the coming months.

I almost forgot to mention my most important test result. Other than the false "Invalid Partition Table!" message, I could not find any significant bugs in Zorin 18, and it worked with every bit of the hardware on both laptops on which I tried it. Even the dedicated night light button on my Thinkpad worked. I probably should have mentioned that earlier. In addition, from what I have seen of Zorin so far, it looks to be a fine choice for anyone wanting to abandon Windows and flee to a far better operating system. Hopefully, the Core and Educational variants of Zorin will continue to be free for years to come, but who can predict?