Back on Zorin OS 17 Pro
My major concern was if kernel 6.8 could handle my new rig. It could 
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YAY, this makes me so happy! 
You are where you belong sir, with us, your Zorin OS family. And I recently read that Aravisian has returned to Zorin OS as well. Other Linux distro's are interesting, I can admit, but Zorin OS is where it feels like home. Glad you've returned, and with a nice looking theme as well.
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Looking forward for Zorins OS 18.
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I am on Zorin OS Lite.
-chuckle-
There is a difference...
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I've been running 17 core on my main desktop and haven't really fiddled with it much. The only exception to that is adding xfce and using that. Possibly a little redundant, but if lite is going away, might as well see how annoying or non annoying it'll be.
It hasn't been that annoying, just fyi. I could switch distros too, but zorins been solid for me that I'd rather keep it.
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I don't know anything about the most modern version of Zorin OS Lite. But I have both Zorin OS 16.3 Pro on one NVME drive, and Zorin OS 16 Pro Lite, on my other NVME drive. Basically, if anything were to go sideways with my installation, I can easily boot into the other drive with Lite on it, benefits of having 2-M.2 slots on the mobo.
What I appreciated with Lite, was just how light it was on the RAM usage, I think it only used 1GB. Now ya, I have 32GB of RAM, but it just leaves more of the RAM to software APPS. I think Lite booted up into the system faster as well. So, resources wise, Lite is king, thanks to XFCE.
The problem I had at the time, was that it wasn't as game ready as I would have liked it to be. But again, this all could have changed with the new Lite version IDK. So I ended up going back to gnome. I still like having Lite as a backup option though.
When you've experienced an OS perma-death, and you have no other machine, or another drive with a working OS, you will know the nightmare I am talking about lol. Gnome is not perfect though, it uses a lot more resources, so you are expected to need at least a minimum of 8GB of RAM, but I would strongly recommend 16GB.
The most RAM I've seen Gnome take up personally, was 1GB.
On average, my gnome installation uses roughly 5.3GB of RAM just having the OS open. To put in perspective however, thats far less RAM usage then Windows 10 and Windows 11 uses, especially with forced on you Windows Recall.
I've noticed people talking about Google Chrome's browser, eating too much of their system RAM. Would you be surprised to know, that Google chrome on my system only uses like 1GB of RAM? Yeah, I was surprised it wasn't worse too.
But here is something interesting to note, I also have Firefox, and its not like it used to be. The longer Firefox is open, for every photo I look at, every bit of website graphics, audio, video, Firefox keeps on consuming RAM. You think closing tabs will fix it? You'd be wrong.
My system started lagging, couldn't figure out why a high performance notebook would suddenly be lagging. Well, I took a look at Stacer, and it showed I was consuming 29GB of RAM, out of an available 32GB of RAM. Guess who the biggest offender was? Firefox!
Once I closed Firefox, my RAM usage went down to 5.3GB instantaneously. It just goes to show, sometimes the performance issues we face, is due to our OS's. But sometimes, its due to garbage software, ruined by poor development decisions.
Anyways, each OS has their strong suits. And I can't wait for OS 18. Zorin OS 18 hype, lets go! 
Wait, is there a tentative date that I missed for Z18?
Nope, but it is in development. It may come out this year though, but im not certain. I just hope the Zorin bros default OS18 to use X11, instead of Wayland. Too many people have had issues with Wayland on OS17.
Like our pal Storm, im so hyped. 
I'm just glad the Linux gods can count ...
Unlike some other that goes 1,2,3,95,98,2000,7,8,10,11
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With how many tabs? Chrome uses a lot of RAM, but it's mostly for resource caching and pre-fetching. That's how they achieve the effect of it being so fast. But using a lot of RAM is not necessarily a bad thing: unused RAM is wasted RAM. A good program will only use what it needs and let the operating system reclaim some of that memory for other programs. But, if there's more of it available that it can use, it definitely should.
Although I will agree that your example with Firefox sounds very extreme... I suspect something else must have been going on there. Personally though, I don't like having more than a few tabs opened at the same time. At most, I have 10-20 while doing some research and need to go back and forth some of them, but otherwise I have only around 5 of them.
Unfortunately we have also have some of that going on over here:
- Gnome 1, 2, 3 -> 40
- Zorin OS 12 -> 15
I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation... 
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I had this same thought.
I know why Zorin OS did it...
But Gnome. Gnome... Gnome.
Well, at least there's a 4 ... so maybe they just had an innocent typo and they just went with it 
I don't think I've ever heard the reason about the bump from Zorin OS 12 to 15, though.
Zorin OS had some interim releases (similar to what is actually covered in the last few posts) that skewed the numbering system a little.
Zorin 15 reset the numbering scheme to what it should be.
It is noteworthy that this results in skipping the number 13. It may be prodigal. Though most of us do not associate that number with bad luck and consider it harmless; there may be users out there put off by the number.
I'm curious: Does that make it the same as Zorin Lite?
I added herbstluftwm to one of my Zorin 17 Core desktops. Not to make it lighter, but since I use antiX on my feeble, elderly laptop, and herbstluftwm is one of the wm you can choose to start your session, I have grown to really appreciate it.
It is a little more difficult to set up on Zorin, as it lacks the integration that it has on antiX, and also the modified autostart that already includes popular launcher keybinds and features like dmenu. I have still not figured out how to make the mouse left handed and it doesn't carry over the setting from my Xorg session so I have to Jimi Hendrix it.
Yesterday I did dedicate a portion of time to researching how to split the autostart file up and make it reference other files. That way I could take all the theme options out of autostart, make dark and light versions, and figure out a way to get herbstluftwm to work with the auto-dark-theme switcher I use (GitHub - littleant/auto-darkmode-switcher: A bash script to auto-switch to darkmode at sunset and back at sunrise for Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, using systemd and no internet connection.) I came up with a crude yet effective solution. But that is all the time I will have to mess around with desktop environments this week. Next week I will slate some time to produce more attractive frame colors and figure out the mouse issue, and possibly figure out a different suite of software to use on it as the default Zorin ones give me some warnings in that session.
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No it doesn't really make it the same. It's missing a couple of things that they do, but it's nothing particularly major for me. For example you have no Zorin appearance that would allow you to change layouts, but you can just change the layout manually as you would normally do in any XFCE environment.
You also, in the future anyway, may not be able to just use the themes that they include, since they won't support XFCE anymore. Currently they just work anyway, but that may not be the case in like 19 and up, for example.
It is true that Zorin OS XFCE themes will be missing as well as some Zorin OS specific modifications like Zorin Appearance & Layouts. In general, much of Zorin OS Lite is mostly Xubuntu, if I am brutal.
What irks me, though, is not missing themes or a particular app.
Zorin is not just a contender. It is steadily among the Top List of distros.
As you view this list, you see the different distros and what Desktop Environments they offer. Many offer quite a few, but some offer only three. Gnome, XFCE, Plasma.
Zorin OS offers just two. And soon...
It will be just one. Kinda like... Windows OS.
To me, fundamentally, this sends a statement and it is a pretty loud one.
I do not miss a Zorin Specific theme or app. I will miss Zorin OS supporting the diversity, variety and user-choice that is what makes GnuLinux great.
No, but in an Interview was said that it could come in the 2nd or 3rd Quarter this Year.
On Zorin 18, we will have a newer Gnome Version - and with that a (way) better Wayland Implementation. So, this should offer a better Experience. Of Course, they shouldn't ban X11. For that it is a bit too early. But I don't think that this will happen here.
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Yes, to lose Zorin Lite is sad. And the Way they published the Decision wasn't the best in my Optinion. But we already had this Topic highly discussed at the Time when it happened.
I understand that they are a 2-Man-Team and so they are limited in Manpower. It is sad, yes. but I understand the Why.
Here I must say that Gnome and Plasma the 2 biggest DE's. So, that should not wonder. And xfce is a DE which is functional and lightweight but a bit behind of the other 2.