I would say try a few out, see which DEs (desktop environments, pretty much the part of the OS that you look at) you like. I recommend trying Fedora Workstation (which is GNOME, a purer form of it compared to Ubuntu’s flavour, and is unrelated to gnomes of the fantasy world), a KDE Plasma distro (like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE), as well as Mint (which is Cinnamon) and ZorinOS (I think it uses a custom variant of GNOME, but I’m not sure).
You either love or hate GNOME, there’s a lot of padding, and it’s very “minimal” and “clean”. Some people say the UI is similar to Mac in that it has a bar on the top and the “dock” (GNOME’s version of the taskbar) looks very similar to Mac. It also has a bunch of touch gestures and such, so it would be good if you have a touchscreen laptop, for example. Make sure to look at GNOME extensions, which helps you customise GNOME to your liking (e.g. transparency, having the dock always be shown kind of like one Windows)
KDE Plasma, out of the box, looks similar to Windows. It, however, is the most customisable and you can change pretty much anything (position of the taskbar, text size of different parts of the UI, colours of all the buttons, etc.) and it’s kind of overwhelming. I particularly like KRunner (which is kind of like Spotlight on Mac and lets you search apps, files, settings, etc. straight from the desktop). Currently I’m using KDE Plasma.
Cinnamon is Linux Mint’s homegrown take on GNOME, which tries to mimic Windows 10 to ease the transition to Linux. Mint focuses on the usability of its GUI apps, so you won’t have to touch the terminal as often (I do recommend you learn how to do simple things like apt to install apps, it’s really useful!). If you don’t like the excessive padding and touch-optimised design of GNOME or think KDE Plasma isn’t for you, Cinnamon might be what you want.
There’s also a bunch of other DEs like Xfce (which is lightweight and meant for lower end devices), MATE (which keeps the design of old GNOME, so it looks less “modern” than other DEs), and COSMIC (which is by System76, recently went from Alpha to Beta so it isn’t perfectly stable yet, but it looks pretty cool with tiling and such).
Take your time to pick, you can always swap out your DE (that’s one of the cool things with Linux, you can literally change the desktop of the entire OS if you want to! It’s kind of insane if you think about it. Recently, I switched from GNOME to KDE Plasma with little issue on Fedora. So don’t be afraid to pick the “wrong” desktop, you can always change it after the fact! You can even install multiple and choose which one to use when you log in, but that will mean having an excess of default apps, meaning multiple file managers, multiple calendar apps, etc.)
Zorin has a commercial license for additional GUI front ends, installation support, and a bunch of “professional” apps. It’s not clear if they’ve done something to make adobe/Autodesk/pro audio stuff work on Linux, pre-bundled their FOSS alternatives, or have made software themselves.
Personally, if I was looking for something “professional”, I’d go PopOS!. But if I were a small or mid-sized business I’d consider Zorin Pro if I could get license to include additional support outside the installer… Or just buy System76 computers with PopOS! pre-installed and support built-in to their sales pipeline already.
That said, Mint is also very Windows (classic)-like in their GUI experince (intentionally). It also has one of the largest Linux communities focusing on GUI usability.
Depends on your use case on which flavor you should go. But for $50, I’m curious what Zorin’s software suite is and might dive in.
It is in fact a bunch of pre-installed free software. I like Zorin, but Zorin Pro just seems like a way to trick businesses into paying for the distro. I guess having access to a support team is nice, but otherwise it’s not worth it at all.
Or just buy System76 computers with PopOS! pre-installed and support built-in to their sales pipeline already.
S76 (and all Linux PCs) are all just insanely expensive and overpowered for the needs of most people. I wish they would just offer a barebones model with an N100 or something for $500 that normal people could afford…
I mean, that’s kinda the cost for low volume sales + computer support.
They’re not selling computers for the average Linux user, they’re selling computers for independent professionals and businesses that need the support licenses to confidently run their operations.
For the average Linux user, they have put out an incredibly stable version of their OS that has a professional in mind (docking station ready, highly optimized GUI workflow tooling, familiar OS styling, and more). We can then go grab a bare machine and toss their OS on ourselves.
I get it though. I’ve strongly considered snagging one of their laptops in the past. Especially since I want to support them. I’ve even considered some other machines for niche purposes (HTPC, home lab VM host)
, but always wind up snagging a Lenovo or IBM laptop or building my own desktop instead.
Mint develops their own desktop called Cinnamon which is like a cross between Gnome2 and windows 7 UIs. Its looks a bit bland, but some people prefer that.
Zorin uses Gnome3, but is heavily customized to give people a choice between windows 7, windows 10 or MacOS type experiences. The UI does look a lot more modern than mint in the looks department. They also have a commercial support option.
Both have a pretty good suite of software for customization and management.
Personally I’m loving Bazzite, which is Fedora based with a lot of customizations for gaming and modern hardware. It’s also immutable, which makes it difficult to break.
Both are adequate. Both are based on Ubuntu. The biggest difference is going to be the interface.
Zorin has a Gnome-ish interface. If you pay a few extra bucks, you can customize it to make it function like Mac or Windows or Ubuntu, etc. in one click.
Mint has a (in my opinion) much less modern interface that I don’t like. But it’s also, I believe, the single most popular Linux distro so there will be endless amounts of community support for it.
zorin is more out of box and mint is lighter. so when you install zorin its going to put in libre office, disk burning, windows rpd, wine with play on linux, its a long list. So it comes down to out of box (I want a bunch of software I may use to be installed along with the os) or lighter and get what you want later. zorin is basically a lazier distro which is why I like it :) while some stuff may be a waste of space I just want it available right away or in a situation where im offline and did not think to install it previously for some reason (disk burning is a good example for this kind of thing)
So I’ve mucked around with ubuntu… gonna switch over to linux. Ideally something more user friendly at first.
Can someone TLDR Zorin OS vs Mint?
For now I just want something I can swap out my main device until I have more time to finish learning ubuntu.
I would say try a few out, see which DEs (desktop environments, pretty much the part of the OS that you look at) you like. I recommend trying Fedora Workstation (which is GNOME, a purer form of it compared to Ubuntu’s flavour, and is unrelated to gnomes of the fantasy world), a KDE Plasma distro (like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE), as well as Mint (which is Cinnamon) and ZorinOS (I think it uses a custom variant of GNOME, but I’m not sure).
You either love or hate GNOME, there’s a lot of padding, and it’s very “minimal” and “clean”. Some people say the UI is similar to Mac in that it has a bar on the top and the “dock” (GNOME’s version of the taskbar) looks very similar to Mac. It also has a bunch of touch gestures and such, so it would be good if you have a touchscreen laptop, for example. Make sure to look at GNOME extensions, which helps you customise GNOME to your liking (e.g. transparency, having the dock always be shown kind of like one Windows)
KDE Plasma, out of the box, looks similar to Windows. It, however, is the most customisable and you can change pretty much anything (position of the taskbar, text size of different parts of the UI, colours of all the buttons, etc.) and it’s kind of overwhelming. I particularly like KRunner (which is kind of like Spotlight on Mac and lets you search apps, files, settings, etc. straight from the desktop). Currently I’m using KDE Plasma.
Cinnamon is Linux Mint’s homegrown take on GNOME, which tries to mimic Windows 10 to ease the transition to Linux. Mint focuses on the usability of its GUI apps, so you won’t have to touch the terminal as often (I do recommend you learn how to do simple things like apt to install apps, it’s really useful!). If you don’t like the excessive padding and touch-optimised design of GNOME or think KDE Plasma isn’t for you, Cinnamon might be what you want.
There’s also a bunch of other DEs like Xfce (which is lightweight and meant for lower end devices), MATE (which keeps the design of old GNOME, so it looks less “modern” than other DEs), and COSMIC (which is by System76, recently went from Alpha to Beta so it isn’t perfectly stable yet, but it looks pretty cool with tiling and such).
Take your time to pick, you can always swap out your DE (that’s one of the cool things with Linux, you can literally change the desktop of the entire OS if you want to! It’s kind of insane if you think about it. Recently, I switched from GNOME to KDE Plasma with little issue on Fedora. So don’t be afraid to pick the “wrong” desktop, you can always change it after the fact! You can even install multiple and choose which one to use when you log in, but that will mean having an excess of default apps, meaning multiple file managers, multiple calendar apps, etc.)
Zorin has a commercial license for additional GUI front ends, installation support, and a bunch of “professional” apps. It’s not clear if they’ve done something to make adobe/Autodesk/pro audio stuff work on Linux, pre-bundled their FOSS alternatives, or have made software themselves.
Personally, if I was looking for something “professional”, I’d go PopOS!. But if I were a small or mid-sized business I’d consider Zorin Pro if I could get license to include additional support outside the installer… Or just buy System76 computers with PopOS! pre-installed and support built-in to their sales pipeline already.
That said, Mint is also very Windows (classic)-like in their GUI experince (intentionally). It also has one of the largest Linux communities focusing on GUI usability.
Depends on your use case on which flavor you should go. But for $50, I’m curious what Zorin’s software suite is and might dive in.
It is in fact a bunch of pre-installed free software. I like Zorin, but Zorin Pro just seems like a way to trick businesses into paying for the distro. I guess having access to a support team is nice, but otherwise it’s not worth it at all.
I think that is the point. Its like red hat. You pay for support.
S76 (and all Linux PCs) are all just insanely expensive and overpowered for the needs of most people. I wish they would just offer a barebones model with an N100 or something for $500 that normal people could afford…
I mean, that’s kinda the cost for low volume sales + computer support.
They’re not selling computers for the average Linux user, they’re selling computers for independent professionals and businesses that need the support licenses to confidently run their operations.
For the average Linux user, they have put out an incredibly stable version of their OS that has a professional in mind (docking station ready, highly optimized GUI workflow tooling, familiar OS styling, and more). We can then go grab a bare machine and toss their OS on ourselves.
I get it though. I’ve strongly considered snagging one of their laptops in the past. Especially since I want to support them. I’ve even considered some other machines for niche purposes (HTPC, home lab VM host) , but always wind up snagging a Lenovo or IBM laptop or building my own desktop instead.
No, that’s the cost of high-end hardware.
Both have an Ubuntu base
Mint develops their own desktop called Cinnamon which is like a cross between Gnome2 and windows 7 UIs. Its looks a bit bland, but some people prefer that.
Zorin uses Gnome3, but is heavily customized to give people a choice between windows 7, windows 10 or MacOS type experiences. The UI does look a lot more modern than mint in the looks department. They also have a commercial support option.
Both have a pretty good suite of software for customization and management.
Personally I’m loving Bazzite, which is Fedora based with a lot of customizations for gaming and modern hardware. It’s also immutable, which makes it difficult to break.
Both are adequate. Both are based on Ubuntu. The biggest difference is going to be the interface.
Zorin has a Gnome-ish interface. If you pay a few extra bucks, you can customize it to make it function like Mac or Windows or Ubuntu, etc. in one click.
Mint has a (in my opinion) much less modern interface that I don’t like. But it’s also, I believe, the single most popular Linux distro so there will be endless amounts of community support for it.
zorin is more out of box and mint is lighter. so when you install zorin its going to put in libre office, disk burning, windows rpd, wine with play on linux, its a long list. So it comes down to out of box (I want a bunch of software I may use to be installed along with the os) or lighter and get what you want later. zorin is basically a lazier distro which is why I like it :) while some stuff may be a waste of space I just want it available right away or in a situation where im offline and did not think to install it previously for some reason (disk burning is a good example for this kind of thing)
Just go Mint and then you can get as deep or not as you want into Linux.
Nyarchlinux is the Linux for you!
https://nyarchlinux.moe/
Honestly I downloaded it as a joke but it’s great
Username checks out? LOL
Looks fun enough to spin up in a VM at least. :)
I love that this exists
Is this a serious comment? Because I don’t see an /s
I use nyarch, btw