Zorin OS 16.2 Observations, Contd.
After discussing this distro with @brent for a while last night, I replaced the Zorin "Core" .ISO with the Zorin "Lite" .ISO in my VM, and proceeded to investigate that release. It turns out that the Lite version would not be an acceptable choice for me. Its DE is Xfce, which is probably a good choice, since the Lite version is targeted at older and resource-challenged hardware, but it's not one I enjoy using.
For me, though, the big showstopper was the fact that, after successfully modifying /etc/fstab to add my NAS shares, and creating symlinks to replace the folders in my /home directory with replacements from those shares, I could not access them at all using the Files utility. They were indeed mounted, and I could access them without a problem in the terminal, but every attempt to access them in Files (whatever that is) failed with permission errors. The Lite version does not offer Anonymous access, as the Core version does, and it also doesn't ask for a password. It just makes using the NAS quite difficult.
In comparison with that, the Core version has been delightful in nearly every way. It just worked as expected. My only problem with it was the lack of virtual desktops, which are important to me. Then it occurred to me that I might be able to add that feature using GNOME Tweaks. So this morning I once again installed the Core version, and used apt to install gnome-tweaks. Indeed, I was able to create 8 virtual workspaces in the bottom panel!
They're a little primitive looking, compared to what we're accustomed to with Solus editions, but they are fully functional. I could find no option to display application icons in them, but just rectangles that approximate the relative size and shape of the applications that are active on that desktop. And the only desktop that displays those rectangles is the active one, so it's easy to tell which one that is. At any rate, this changes my opinion of Zorin Core dramatically. I wouldn't have considered using it for any length of time originally, but having made this change, I could see myself using this release as a daily-driver if I needed to.
Another feature that almost works well is this distro's fractional scaling. @tomscharbach, did you try this during your examination of Zorin? It is trivial to configure, offers values in 25% increments (e.g., 125%, 150%, etc.) and does not require a reboot to enable it - just a mouse click does that. But then there's the almost part.
After I changed to 125% scaling for my full HD laptop screen, the mouse cursor movements trailed the movements of the mouse itself by an annoying amount. If I moved the mouse, I'd then watch the mouse cursor slowly catch up with it. It was as if it were now controlled by software instead of hardware. I imagine one could get used to it after a while, if the scaling were very important, but it's certainly hard to ignore.
If fractional scaling is important to you, I'd strongly recommend using a KDE DE, such as Solus' Plasma edition. It works much better than the GNOME version.
That now completes my further observations for Zorin 16.2. Of the two free editions, I still strongly prefer the Core version over the Lite version, especially now that I've been able to add virtual desktops to it using GNOME Tweaks. I've never had any love for the Xfce DE, and Zorin's implementation of it is no exception. The modified GNOME DE of the Core edition doesn't look or work like GNOME at all, and I much prefer it.
