Yesterday evening I came home to a Zorin Update notification requesting I restart my computer. I did so and and upon reboot I lost my two secondary monitors, sound and network. It wouldn't even see the devices despite the fact hwinfo said they existed. My first thought was, "the kernel updated but the drivers didn't. Dunno why."
AI suggested I reboot to the Zorin boot menu and load an older kernel. When I did, it wouldn't load the desktop, most likely because I am using Nvidia drivers that compile per kernel version on install so naturally drivers for the older kernel are unavailable. So I tried some other convoluted steps to no avail.
Then it occurred to me to boot the older kernel in "recovery mode" which is console-only and doesn't load graphics drivers. Per the recovery menu I did a package repair, enabled networking, dropped to a root prompt and did "apt update" and "apt upgrade" then rebooted. Everything works fine now (although I did have to futz around with Steam to get Windrose to work).
It seems the update process borked at some point, only updating the kernel but not the driver packages. It could have been a network outage or some other issue. Regardless, it would be nice to check this sort of thing before implementing updates for the kernel or drivers.
I've recommended Zorin to anybody attempting to escape Microsoft Windows. So far it's been pretty successful and these people have managed to maintain their usual "Windows" workflow in Zorin Linux.
As for myself, I've had to find some interesting work-arounds for some of the unusual things that I do personally as an IT and developer. I also do gaming so installing Steam to play my old favorites has been a little bit of an adventure. But I've managed to transition from Windows pretty successfully only using a Windows 10 VirtualBox for one unsolvable issue regarding RemotePC and Wayland.
Anyway, keep up the good work Zorin Team.
Best,
Jeffrey Cobb