One of the more widely used Ubuntu spinoffs, non-techie friendly Zorin has put out three editions of its latest version – Zorin OS 17.1 – and there are still more to come.
Zorin OS 17.1 is still based on the now very nearly two-year-old Ubuntu 22.04 “Jammy Jellyfish” release, which will soon be replaced with the new LTS version, 24.04 “Noble Numbat”. However, it’s based on the latest point release: Canonical released 22.04.4 in February, and it picks up the kernel and graphics stack from Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic”. This means that Zorin OS 17.1 includes kernel 6.5.
Both paid and free editions include an assortment of desktop layouts, such as one aping upstream GNOME Shell
It’s easy to change layouts with Zorin Appearance, here showing the four free layouts, with the classic Windows layout active
We took a look at the beta of Zorin OS 17 late last year. The editions released so far are the three based on Zorin’s heavily customized – and customizable – GNOME desktop. Core is free, and includes a fairly standard suite of apps similar to most distros.
Educational
The special Education edition is also free, and adds an assortment of software aimed at children and younger users, including educational games, programming environments, and so on. It’s a comprehensive selection and includes some non-obvious tools, such as the handy LogSeq program for taking and organizing notes. One we hadn’t seen before is the Reading Strip GNOME extension which shades the whole screen except for a narrow horizontal strip, to help those with dyslexia or reading difficulties.
The Education edition includes the LogSeq hierarchical outliner-cum-note-taking app, shown here with GNOME’s Reading Strip extension active
Some of the built-in tools are for teachers, rather than students. Veyon helps teachers monitor and control what a classroom full of pupils are doing, and there’s also Kolibri, which brings together multiple channels of free online (and offline) teaching materials and resources. We found 37 included sources of material in English, for instance.
The Education edition includes Stellarium, a sort of software planetarium
Over in the £49/€48 Pro edition, there is a different suite of bundled apps. We listed some of the highlights when we looked at Zorin OS 16.2 and the company has its own list of alternatives to Windows apps. To be fair, it’s the single most comprehensive of any Linux distro we’ve seen, and for the price, the 20GB or so of SSD space they take up would cost you a great deal less than the OS itself.
The apps included are all FOSS, but that’s not all you get for your money: the Pro package also includes support, plus half a dozen additional desktop layouts available in the Zorin Appearance app. It’s still GNOME, so apps mostly have no menu bar and so on, but this is substantially more customizability than any other GNOME-based distro offers unless you’re willing to get very familiar with the GNOME Extensions website – and that usually entails a few desktop crashes as well.
The almost unavoidable result is that Zorin OS is big. It’s consistently one of the biggest distros around. For example, the Education edition won’t install without some 35GB of free disk space.
We tried the relatively new Zorin upgrade tool, which débuted in Zorin OS 16.3 last August. It seamlessly upgraded our old installation of 16.3 to 17.1, bringing across all our apps and settings intact. The login screen defaults to Wayland, but there’s an option to run with X.org instead. Being based on GNOME Shell 43.9, this is not a lightweight OS, and it needs a machine with working 3D acceleration. It did run fairly smoothly in VirtualBox, although some of the games exhibited some text corruption and we saw occasional freezes. And, handily, unlike Linux Mint, it detects when running in a VM and offers to install the guest additions for you automatically.
Speaking of its system requirements, though, one thing that’s not included for now is the Zorin OS Lite edition, with an identical-looking but less-demanding desktop environment. We asked if that had been dropped, and CEO Artyom Zorin told us:
We’ll be launching the Zorin OS 17.1 Lite edition (which uses XFCE) in the near future, but we don’t have an exact release date set yet.
He also told us the company is still hard at work on its planned fleet-management tool, Zorin Grid:
The development of Zorin Grid will be our primary focus for the rest of the year, and we’re planning to launch the initial version later in the year.
When the Reg FOSS desk first encountered Zorin OS, we were somewhat unimpressed: the bundled apps in the Pro edition are all free tools that you could download for yourself, which is precisely why most distros include a software store of some kind these days. Regular readers will have also worked out by now that this vulture is not a big fan of the GNOME environment.
However, we’re definitely starting to get it now. One of the most frequently asked questions on any Linux forum is “is there a Linux equivalent for”… followed by some proprietary app that that person can’t live without. There are lots of them out there, but finding them does seem to be especially tough for Linux newbies. Similarly, the GNOME desktop can be modified if you’re willing to learn how to find, install and configure extensions – not to mention working out which combinations work together without clashing.
Doing this for you is why Linux distributions exist. Long-term Windows users still think it’s funny to joke that running Linux means learning to build your own OS from sticky tape, glue, toothpicks and cardboard tubes. It’s not like that anymore and hasn’t been for most of this century, but it’s still the image.
Zorin OS does more of this for you than any other distro, and even though the Pro edition costs money, the company claims over half a million downloads of version 17 and over six million of the previous version. Those are serious numbers.
It’s one of the smartest-looking distros around, and release 17.1 refines that with handy tweaks such as more informative file icons in the file manager. As well as native Debian packages, it also supports both Snap and Flatpak packages. Plus, right there in the main menu there’s also an option entitled Windows App Support. This optional feature installs Bottles, which is a wrapper around WINE that isolates each Windows apps in its own separate container for improved stability. WINE is up to version 9 now and it works pretty well these days, thanks in large part to commercial Linux games hardware. A nice wrinkle here is that if you try to install something that has an native Linux version, it will try to detect it and tell you.
The WINE Bottles add-on had a brave, if vain, stab at installing Microsoft Office 2003
Zorin OS, like its Irish cousin Linux Mint, is not a distro intended to appeal to existing Linux users. Instead, it targets not-very-technical Windows users. For instance, as the Reg has covered in depth before, Windows 11 won’t run on a lot of existing PCs, many of which are still perfectly capable, well-specified kit. We suspect that there are also lots of people who, perfectly understandably, held off from the underwhelming Windows 8 or 8.1. For those still on Windows 7 or 8.x, the free Windows 10 upgrades have ended.
If you have a geriatric PC that, when it was new, ran Windows 7 reasonably well, then today it will run Zorin OS just fine. The fact that Zorin OS 17.1 is still based on the 2022 release of Ubuntu is a distinct advantage, in terms of support for older hardware.
It looks fresh and clean. Instead of the idiosyncratic GNOME desktop, it looks reassuringly familiar and Windows-like, and with one click it can ape Windows 7, or 8, or 10, or 11 – or ChromeOS or other desktops. There’s even a good chance it can run those particular Windows apps you can’t live without.
Yes, it’s big, and yes, the full edition costs money when most distros are free, but it’s far cheaper than buying a new PC to run Windows 11. ®
