[Now edited to be a single topic, I'll do the same with the other points.]
[Apologies for the length of this – to keep the context I have put things together, since it might be worth seeing how I used to do things to understand why it is useful, rather than me repeat the same stuff in multiple threads. So this is one post, but I have numbered and used headings for my – possibly related – questions. If this is the wrong approach, and each question/issue should be a separate thread, let me know and I’ll split it. Thanks!]
Hi. I've finally made the transition! I had been using Win7 as my OS for a long time - not perfect, but it didn't make me angry like Win10 did every time I had to use it. I had also played with ZorinOS on a separate partition, and liked it so much I named a corporation in my series of SF books (the Lost Solace books) after Zorin. I’ll give some context first.
I do a lot of work in Daz Studio, and my 2009 Win7 desktop was getting a bit long in the tooth. So I spent months researching new PCs, and eventually ordered one. It came last week, and after a raft of issues (one M2 SSD wasn’t showing up, the other was in the wrong slot, and at first the internal HDD was super slow and was randomly losing files – I got lucky and a full reformat seems to have left it working fine, but all these issues took days to diagnose and (hopefully) fix). Anyway, it’s been perfect for the last few days.
Setup: 500GB M2 SSD running Zorin OS. 250GB M2 SSD running Win10. 4TB HDD for my data. A boot menu defaults to Zorin, but I can choose Win10 for when I need to do 3D rendering, or to play some game that doesn’t work in Linux. Zorin is ext4; Win10 NTFS; and the Data drive is NTFS so both operating systems can see it and access files. So even if I am waiting for a file to render in Win10, I can do some other work.
I ordered two 2021 introductory books to Linux and have been reading a lot, so over time I should become much more knowledgeable, and my daily Zorin use has been mostly straightforward once I got email set up (though for some reason I can’t get Thunderbird to let me have a profile anywhere other than the default location – oh well, I’ll come back to that one day).
So the setup is similar to what I had before in Win7, when all my data was on the D:, and the Desktop, which is my work environment (since I can arrange the shortcuts to folders and files according to priority and project). Browser downloads go straight to my Desktop. So when I needed to back up/synchronise my data, I only had to do the D: and the desktop. In Windows I never used its special folders for anything, and used a hack to hide them all and just show my preferred folder shortcuts. For file shortcuts I often pinned them to the (pinned) program icon in my task bar.
For ZorinOS I am tweaking some of my procedures. For example, I can rename batches of files in Zorin, but it is a different procedure with extra steps. My muscle memory of Win+M to minimise to the desktop is taking a bit of retraining to get used to Win+D. That kind of thing. I can do what I need to, but just need to adapt slightly to other ways of doing things. I’ve already found answers to many questions, but have also kept a list of things I haven’t worked out yet. I thought I’d put them here (numbered) in case any have easy answers. Many of them are about basic UI things. Thanks!
1> File deletion notification.
I like a confirmation of some kind, because it is so easy to knock the Del key (or for the cat to do it). I noticed that if I delete from my Data drive Zorin gives me a prompt first; if from the Zorin SSD then it doesn’t give a prompt, but does give a popup with undo. That works too. HOWEVER! If I delete a file from the Desktop I get no warning and no notification. Since it is my major workspace, that is a potential issue. I set my preferences for notification, so is it a bug that Zorin doesn’t do that for the desktop? Expected behaviour should be that, if you set a preference, it applies globally, not changing based on which folder you delete from on the same drive.
This will help the future visitors to the forum.