@Leonos Just had another read theough of your first post. I am not aware that Zorin has ever stated 32-bit support in respect of 'old kit', but perhaps this should be made clearer.
From memory the last edition of Zorin that came with 32-bit Zorin was Zorin 12.
In respect of Zorin Connect it is a hybrid of GSConnect and KDEConnect (at least on first launch it was). I also posted elsewhere on here, Zorin Connect only has 4 developers, whereas KDEConnect has over 30 devs.
This is why I get annoyed with LTT Haters. You don't have to be a fan but what they are trying to do is be constructive, and realistic.
Zorin HAS breathed new life into 3 old PCs of mine. They are useful now where they were junk before. To say that Zorin is "lightning fast" is not true, for me anyway. It is MUCH slower than Windows 10 starting up and switching between tasks. However, I'm using three PCs, two daily, that would be e-waste if not for Linux, and they all run absolutely fine with Zorin Core, with 4 GB RAM. My Windows laptops have 8GB and 16GB respectively, they're much newer too, so they're bound to be faster!
I installed Zorin on a core 2 duo with 2 GB of DDR2, it was usable. Ended up adding 4 GB of RAM and switching to Zorin Lite, much better performance.
Technically, the claims are true.
Great to see that Zorin works well to revive old machines in some cases! That being said, if you had to add RAM to actually revive the old machine.. then that's not Zorin that revived the old machine?
In my case, I have quite a few computers with Win10 / Zorin 18 dual boots now and I am not seeing Zorin being faster. For one of these (with 4Gb RAM, which is larger than the 2Gb stated in the minimum requirements of Zorin) Windows was clearly faster. I don't see how a 2Gb RAM computer could run Zorin 18 and would be interested to hear from people who tried this..
Many on this forum would agree with you. We scratch our heads at how the Zorin website has been left unchanged for so long. At one time their claim of minimum hardware requirements might have actually been true.
The claims that Core (Gnome) replaces Lite (XFCE) have not withstood benchmarking, either.
The Zorin bros should stick with what they know. If your comparing a modern computer running Zorin OS Core, and a second exact same computer running Windows 11, with all the invasive recall and everything else slowing it down, well yeah, the computer running Zorin OS will come out on top, thats basic science testing there.
If we compare Linux based on Zorin OS XFCE Lite, to Windows 11, XFCE will come out on top, at biblical benchmark levels in comparison. But, if your trying to say that Zorin OS 18 Core, is going to speed up a 15 to 20 year old computer, sorry, the science is not there to back up such claims, because the hardware is too old, and has less to do with what software runs on it.
What we see with Linux, as new Linux distro versions come out, while they don't require premium top end hardware, they do run better on modern computers. And light versions of Linux, can run ok on 10 year old hardware.
With each new version of Windows however, they always required modern era computers, due to high level system requirements. In the 90's, most computers ran either Win95 or Win98. When WinXP came out, it couldn't run on 90's computers, due to those higher system requirements.
Same when Win7 came out, forget your XP machine, you better have had a machine from the late 2000's to run Win7, or forget it. As I said, Windows has always been a resource hog, but never as intense as Win11. Most gamers who are on that OS, state the OS is using 30% of their CPU. They often state, if they were not using top of the line 8Core - 12Core CPU's, they would have no headroom for gaming at all.
So, with that said, if I were the Zorin bros, my recommendation, is to state, using modern computers, Zorin OS will speed up your computer performance, as compared to an equal machine, running Win11.
