Zorin would not install a deb file (keyboard) I had. It said pending.... then I read on the forum that it was b/c I was not connected to the internet. Then I read how often Zorin connects to the internet. I need to control when and why I am online. Zorin appears from posts on the forum to not allow that. Like the poster said in the forum, this is totally unacceptable.
Supposedly ( someone ) Zorin was going to get back to the poster about this issue, but never did.
I did buy the Pro right off assuming it would be a customer focused distro owing to my having bought it. This is a huge issue for dev's machines. They cannot be connected to the internet. Google is finally disconnecting its devs from the internet and we did the same some time ago.
Security and privacy issues are enough to warrant wanting to be in control of when and why your computer connects to the internet, but another issue is this- when you require (for no reason) that my machine connect to the internet to install a .deb I downloaded, you are forcing me to load software which I may not want, specifically, the most recent version, which is often borken, full of bugs or corrupted in some way which affects not only that program but others on my machine.
The only hope anyone has of having a stable reliable machine is to get it into that state with some combination of software versions then stop changing those versions. If one thing changes, the incompatibility issues or bugs in that one change can make your machine unusable. it's not theoretical, it happens all the time. If you need to get work done with a tool, if that's what your machine represents to you, then don't take updates and get it off the internet.
For example,I've had Zorin on my machine for 90 minutes. Since it forced me to connect to the internet to install my keyboard, I have no idea what version of my kb driver is being used. Did it go to my kb manufacturer and get the 'atest version? I have no idea. It's now possible. I am sure I could find out what version of the sw I am running, but that's presumes the kb manufacturer didn't slip a "bug fix" into a release without updating the release number. Is that bad practice? Yes, but so what? People do such things in the world. Is it not your fault? Sure, fine, it's not your fault. But it is because of your decisions that I have no control over when my machine goes online and does what. I now have to factor into my troubleshooting that the driver I have is not the driver installed.
What I have control over is limited to my ability to gate my machine. Once that is taken away from me, innumerable other variables can be introduced to any problem I have and it makes reasoning your way to a solution a nightmare and , at core, nearly impossible.
The real world result right, now for me, on this issue, is my keyboard lighting / software stopped working. This is a material issue with me not an aesthetic one.
Here's the bottom line. Software, including Linux, is far more complex and complicated than even its devs realize. Every time they change something, they break something else. They don't like to think of things this way because it implies they don't know what they're doing somehow, but it's not that. It's that their mental model of what they're doing is far far less complex than the actual reality they're interacting with. Literally, they don't know (everything) they're doing and they can't. They only find out when someone tells them what they've done. We call these "bug reports" . That works well enough in the long run (with a special emphasis on "long run"), but in the short run it means lost days of work as the recipients of their mistakes struggle to work around them. You're forcing me to take on those mistakes by forcing me to take updates and connect to the internet to install software.
This is not working for me (literally) for no reason other than someone's bug got shoved down my throat when I had a known-to-be-good .deb already downloaded.
At the bottom, this is about control. For whatever reason, OS writers / branchers want to literally force their users to be online and take updates, even when those updates waste the user's time adn being online puts them at risk.
It's so obvious that it's the wrong thing to do to your customers, yet they keep on doing it because, well, because they can and it serves some unknown need for them.
So this ends this experiment with paying to be a better linux at least for me.
Here is the forum thread I found:
HTH.