Are symbolic links portable?

Hello. I came from Linux Mint and I love overall looking and UI of Zorin OS so much.

I wanna stay with it for a while. Though, I have my personal problem.
I've been creating symbolic links to all of my favorite pictures throughout my time of using Linux Mint (similar to how I used shortcuts on Windows).

On Zorin OS however, all of my symlinks are not recognized as "link". According to the file manager (Nautilus ?), they're treated as if a broken picture that can't be opened.

Throughout my recent years, I've been to Steam Deck (KDE Plasma), Nobara (KDE Plasma) or Manjaro. These branches of Linux didn't have any problem with my symlinks. So I have no idea why doesn't Zorin OS too ?

Hello, and welcome to Zorin OS!

Symbolic links are portable since that's a native feature of the OS. However, if the location they point to doesn't exist then they'll be broken. You need to ensure that the file structure in the new system is exactly the same as in the old one.

Probably too late at this point, but just for future reference: when you create symbolic links and you plan on moving them around to other systems you should use absolute paths. That is, specify the entire path to the original file the link points to, starting at the root of the file system.
The opposite of this, and likely your case here, is relative paths. This is a shorter way of specifying the location of the original path but if you move it, or the structure of the file system changes, it will break.

Impossible to tell without looking at how/where you are storing these links and their original files... But being that Steam and Nobara use the same desktop environment (KDE Plasma) that certainly seems to be most probable cause.

I tried creating a symlink, keeping the absolute path correct on Zorin OS and now boot back into Linux Mint (22.1).

Now on Linux Mint, the link created by Zorin OS looks like a broken picture too. As if Linux Mint doesn't know what kind of file is that.

Can you share the output of?

ls -l /path/to/link
ls -l /path/to/original

Are you using multiple drives?