I love the look of Zorin OS and i'm happy to drop the $39 to install it and get the MacOS style frontend. However I have a couple of questions.
How much control is there over the Nvidia proprietary drivers? I ran into trouble on Pop OS! updating to the 515 drivers from the 510 drivers in that they didn't work well with my card. The solution was just to roll them back but that turned out to be a bit of a nightmare.
How far off is the 17 release? How often do point releases come out? I'm happy to pay $39 for the OS, I would object to paying $39 for the OS and having to buy it again to get the next version when it is out in a month? It isn't really clear?
Is it possible to install it across multiple hdd's? I gather it would take a manual partitioning (and that would be no problem), but it wasn't really obvious from the install I did into a VM to take a look. Ideally i'd like to use btrfs and pool all the drives togethers into one drive. Is that possible?
You can easily choose which Nvidia drivers to use from Software & Updates in the Additional Drivers tab. You can test this out using the Live USB trial version of Zorin OS.
Point and click the checkbox for the driver you wish to use.
This makes a lot of sense. Currently, the likely range of release for Zorin OS 17 is about a year from now, give or take a few months.
But the actual release date is not yet set.
Point releases come out every few months or so and they are included in the Zorin OS Pro bundle, as well as included in all the Free Zorin OS versions.
For in home use, yes. You can install on more than one machine in your home. If you are a school or business, please contact the ZorinGroup for business or bulk licensing.
Most likely, yes. Zorin OS works perfectly fine on most RAID enabled devices. But it would be wise to check all your devices, first.
Zorin OS works with the BRTFS, as well.
I popped in on a VM and looks good. I will try running it from a USB stick, but I don't really want to blow my existing linux install away with the core version only to then have to do it again and put the pro-version over the top.
It sounds like from the other answer that I can do what I want, so should be good to go.
Ahh, I actually meant the machine I have has 2 hard drives. When I installed PopOS it would only install to one drive. Then I added the other drive as a /home drive. That works, but i'd much rather just have it as one big btrfs pool. Which from the rest of your answer it sounds like it will do fine.
Oh I see. Yes, doing your BRTFS and pooling the drives is the way to go. Zorin OS would also only be able to install to one drive - you could set the other drive as home, the same way. But it sounds like not what you want to do.
I am not aware of any Operating System that can install on multiple drives.
To a computer operating system, another drive is like another planet. Even if they are linked, they are and always will be Separate places with a gulf between them.
I second testing core on a live USB first add a large persistent file and you can play with Nvidia drivers and a game and such and see which one works best.
Installing across both drives, how I have done it is manually partitioned then, they must be wiped, gpt and dynamic and then create a simple striped volume. Find a Ubuntu howto for brtfs. I do want to note that it is cutting edge and considered half finished by many so might not be ready for your main rig.
I prefer separate volumes for / and /home just for data retention on upgrades or resinstalls but software striping doesn't work if the disk is in basic mode, which dynamic works with gpt not mbr. Some older high end mobo will support it on the hardware level for mbr / basic.
There are Problems with auto update not installing the correct driver So,
The Best Way to know the Best Graphic Drivers for your NVIDIA card and not trying each of them to spoil your PC is to use this page provided by NVIDIA itself and not install anything else
