Hi everyone,
I wanted to share my feedback after recycling an old Asus VivoBook (X513EA, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) from Windows 11 to Zorin OS. To be completely honest, I am absolutely blown away by the performance and stability.
A bit of background: I’ve been using Linux since 1992, starting with Slackware (back in the floppy disk days), then moving through RedHat, Mandrake/Mandriva, CentOS, and AlmaLinux. In corporate environments, I spent my career working with heavy UNIX systems like AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and RHEL. I am a die-hard UNIX fan.
For years, I tried to migrate my personal workstations to Linux, but always ran into roadblocks:
Fedora felt too unstable, with major updates often breaking my workflow.
Ubuntu is great, but I never liked their desktop redesigns (like Unity).
Manjaro with Mate or Cinnamon was okay, and KDE Plasma is nice but felt too heavy. For older hardware, I usually preferred XFCE for its lightweight speed.
I even tried Anduin OS, which gave me a taste for a modern Linux desktop, but it lacked stability.
Ultimately, discovering GNOME customized with extensions like ArcMenu completely changed my perception of Linux as a viable, polished desktop OS. (I also used a MacBook Pro with macOS and Homebrew for a while, but Apple's ecosystem has become far too closed for my taste).
Why Zorin OS won me over:
On every machine I’ve tested it on, Zorin OS detected all my hardware flawlessly. On this recycled VivoBook, it runs faster than ever, gives me nearly 3 hours of battery life, and handles sleep mode perfectly.
As someone who manages local infrastructure, the killer feature for me is the network stack: WireGuard and CIFS/Samba shares reconnect instantly and never drop when the machine wakes up from sleep. This used to be a constant headache on Windows.
Today, the only reason I still keep Windows in my life is for high-end gaming on my main rig (equipped with an RTX 4070 Ti Super), which I run in a dual-boot configuration with Zorin OS. It’s the ultimate pragmatic compromise.
Conclusion:
Zorin OS 18.1 has achieved what few distributions manage to do: it has become a commodity. The interface is so polished, reliable, and out of the way that I can finally focus entirely on my projects rather than troubleshooting the operating system.
Mission accomplished, and I hope it lasts! Kudos to the dev team.
Thanks,
Sylvain