Zorin OS 16.2 Observations
Moving on now, Zorin is a distro I've visited before, but this is a new point release, so I thought I'd take another look to see what's changed. @tomscharbach was interested in it as a Linux that would be easy for Windows users to work with, and that may still be true.
It's an Ubuntu derivative, which makes me happy, as that means I won't have any issues figuring out how to use their package manager, or whether I'll be able to mount my NAS shares.
It took nearly half an hour on a fast system to download the 2.9GB .ISO file, but I attribute that to the fact that it's a new release, and their server is probably struggling to deal with the demand.
When the .ISO file has been loaded, it offers the option to check the media (MD5 sum) before beginning the installation. Thus, the user can verify the file with just a mouse click, instead of looking for a utility to get the sum and then check it against what it's supposed to be. This feature isn't unique to Zorin, but it's pretty rare. I'd like to see Solus adopt it for the new .ISOs.
If you install this on a VirtualBox VM, the process to install the guest additions is very easy and straightforward. You'll need to use apt to install gcc, make, and perl first, but that's true with most distros. The kernel is the same as the current one in Solus, so I'm assuming that the Ubuntu it's based on is an LTS version.
I was a bit puzzled about how to set a dark theme, but finally I typed "theme" in the menu's search field, and was rewarded with that setting. There are few theme choices, but thankfully there was adwaita-dark, and that will greatly enhance my enjoyment of Zorin, I'm sure. It's a very competent dark theme.
As you probably know, I depend on my NAS for data storage, and Zorin's "Files" (which looks like Dolphin) had no trouble at all displaying it, and its shares, and allowed me to access them as Anonymous, so I don't need to constantly enter my password. I love it!
In preparation for mounting those nfs shares, I installed the micro editor and nfs-common. Modifying /etc/fstab to include my NAS shares produced no drama at all, and the Files utility is now able to display the contents of those shares.
Since Zorin accepts .DEB files, there was no problem installing Vivaldi, my preferred browser. I'll spend some time syncing it and creating named tab stacks as soon as the Mexico City Formula 1 Grand Prix is over, and that will conclude my observations of the newest version of Zorin.
In short, it's one of my favorite distros. It has given me no grief at all while installing it and configuring it as I would if it were to be my daily driver.
