Just wanted to give a big thumbs up to the devs for Zorin 18, which has been a real eye-opener for me over the last few days. I first tried it on a mini PC and thought I would experiment for a few days, but after getting over some initial albeit small hurdles, the next day I went straight to wipe Win 11 from my main PC and install Zorin.
After another day of carefully choosing apps and sorting a little glitch with Bluetooth, all seems stable. And wow, what an OS! There's literally no going back to Windows now. Very, very pleased!
I was in the same situation. Fed up with Win11 so I looked at a few distros. Saw a video on YouTube talking about Zorin so it got added to the list.
Now, I've tried Fedora before. It's a really nice distro, very clean and performs well. BUT. After I installed it I saw there were 76 updates. Ok, I thought and blithely clicked the update-all. Result was a completely bricked install. Couldn't find the kernel. Nothing worked.
So I downloaded Zorin and it installed like a dream. No issues with it at all.
I am dual-booting with win11 because I still need to get updates for keyboard, mouse and headset which can only be done on Win11.
I did have some issues getting Steam working properly. The flatpak version randomly freezes games so uninstalled that and got it via apt install.
Then the taskbar icon wouldn't work . More googling and what not. Wiped that, went back to flatpak and then today, decided to give the .deb version another try. This time it all worked fine.. no idea what went wrong last time.
Some people have issues with audio - I did but I was using a very very old AV receive that I had hooked up with an optical cable.. Evidently that's not supported by any distro I could try. Finally got a new AV with HDMI and now I get proper 5.1 sound which I never could on Win11. So I am very happy with Zorin.
I definitely agree. Not only did I put it on my own computer, but I also installed it on my mothers' Chromebook and my little sisters' laptop for high school. They haven't had any issues using it. Granted they aren't exactly power users like me, but I'm glad they are able to use Zorin OS without any confusion.
Trade-offs will be some issues with hardware support which I suppose is to be expected. I had a Bluetooth dongle from Amazon with a strange name....worked fine in Windoze but Zorin spat it out. Swapped it for a Logitech one and hey presto all is generally well. It doesn't always auto-connect to the speaker though which is a bit annoying, can't see any patterns or reasons why at this point, but I can live with that.
I would have classed myself as a power user on Windows but competely new to Linux. It's been fascinating, but I have had to do very little "tinkering" under the hood so far. I hope to keep it that way!
Also forgot to add, I am running a Seagate FireCuda hybrid SSHD (as I just find SSDs so boring.....!) and an old i5-9400 in my desktop. Runs really well and don't have any TPM nonsense to worry about. Could get a few extra years out of this CPU.