Horribly disappointed with 17.1 Pro: Lag and fit-and-finish

General Help
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I waited until 17.1 to come out to purchase the Pro version, and I now regret it. I won't be able to use the OS due to a few problems, the main one being constant intermittent lag.

I can't believe they tried Wayland first. It's not stable. A quick Internet search (such as "wayland is not stable" will show you many, many problems. The 'X' project, from which we get X11, started in 1984. If 'X' developers stopped developing right now, it would still take Wayland developers 20 years to reach development parity.

So, I switched to X11 and still experience the random stuttering. I'm extremely grateful that my GF did not try to install or upgrade to 17.1, she would have been unhappy and not being a technical person, she would not have known how to deal with these issues or reinstall Zorin OS 16.3 Pro.

Is there a way to fix the X11 lag? I haven't found an answer since late last night.

The second issue that was disappointing was the lack of fit and finish that I've come to expect from Zorin OS. I've been using Zorin OS since 13, purchasing the OS for the Pro level since 15 onward. This has been the worst experience out of the box.

For example, the Software store is now the generic GNOME store seen on many free distributions. It is significantly different than the 16.x store. Further, I would search for something (such as 'PDF') and while installing software that it found, the store would constantly refresh, to the point where I gave up and stopped using it. I would be half way down the search results, go to click on an app and before I could, it would refresh, sending me back to the top of the results. At which point, I would start scrolling and it would, again, refresh. sigh

The next one is more of an annoyance than it is "a problem", but it's a major annoyance: Firefox is a flatpak install.

I tried:

$ cd $HOME/.mozilla/...

Only to discover that it does not exist. Not only that, simple options are not present that are with the .deb package, such as a split URL bar. If I were to keep Zorin OS 17.1 Pro, I would have to deinstall Firefox, find the appropriate deb package and install it, just so I could create a user.js file.

I feel like I want my money back. I know I won't ask for it, because I don't mind financially supporting open source projects; however, if I compare this transaction to my expectations while eating at a restaurant and receiving a poor quality product, I would complain to the owner and ask for a refund. I don't have a lot of extra money to spend and it's getting worse as prices rise. This is the first time I've ever felt buyer's remorse with Zorin OS. That will teach me to purchase it without trying it out with the Core ISO. I hope Zorin OS 18 is better, because in its current state, I won't be able to use 17.x.

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The X11 and Wayland Thing ... That is a Discussion with a long, LONG Beard. I use Wayland and have no greater Problems. No Lag or something.

The Gnome Thing is a bit ... I mean Zorin 17 stand on a new Base Ubuntu 22. But Zorin adjust this Base. They didn't took the Ubuntu 22 Gnome version 42. They built Gnome 43 in it. And the Gnome Software Center is even more up-to-date. It is Version 45. So that is the Reason that it looks so different.

The Refreshing of the Gnome Software Center is a little bit annoying; I understand that. When you install something and go further for searching other Stuff and then the Program is installed, it refreshes the Status - even when You make other Things. The Z16 Version had that too. But it wasn't so worse that now.

Firefox as a Flatpak is a Compromise because by default would be Firefox Snap installed. That comes from Canonical/Ubuntu. On zorin You don't have the .deb Version anymore. When You want Firefox You could add the new Mozilla Repo. Then You can get Firefox and Updates for Firefox are coming with the Software Updates from the System. Or You take the Download Version from the Developers Website.

For Firefox I have the Hope that Zorin could integrate the Mozilla Repo in the Future by default. So, it would be available again - and directly come from the Developer.

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Yeah, but I did not install any apps/programs before it refreshed. It just randomly refreshed, on it's own. Further, if I did install an app, it would also refresh. With no exaggeration, the GNOME software app refreshed approximately 20 times in 1-2 minutes, both on its own and after software installation. This is unusable, if not unacceptable.

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I think that this is honestly very well said. It is notable that your expectations have been set by your experiences with Zorin OS.

Zorin OS 17 shipping with Flatpak Firefox:
Mozilla internally made their own decision to only support specific packaging formats. In order to be on top of security updates, the installed Firefox needs to be linked to a repository. Mozilla eventually did decide to create and host a Debian APT repository, but long after Zorin OS 17 was well on the road to release.
Fortunately, the repository is now set up and users can use it:

The Gnome-Software store:
I have long voiced my opinions about the Gnome Software Store. I understand that it is easier to use for a new user than Synpatic. It is, at times and being non-verbose, a bit too easy to use and this causes problems. Such as not informing the user of what it is about to remove.
The bugs with Gnomes Software Store are long standing. Fortunately, a person does not need to be technical or a GnuLInux guru to sidestep the software store entirely and install packages with ease using other means. I personally have always considered the Gnome Software store to be a sort of stepping stone. A means of introducing the topic easily, but allowing the user to move on to better options without overwhelming them.

Lag on the Gnome Desktop:
This really is the big ticket item.
I do not know the cause. A large number of users have reported the same experience.
I must point out that in reality, the difference between using X11 desktop and Wayland is measurable in milliseconds - well below human perception. The vast majority of the time, the user cannot perceive the difference. It is miniscule.
Some users may report seeing a difference though and this is due to two factors:

  • Using heavy intensive graphical applications will be enough to show a perceivable difference in responsiveness and speed.
  • Many applications themselves have been streamlined, partly due to patching them to work with Wayland when Wayland lacks support for many of the older features. This means that the applications have been slimmed down, using less resources.
    For example the gnome-screenshot tool does not work in Wayland. So Gnome integrated it into the Gnome Shell doing away with the modular app and it is greatly reduced in its functionality.

The way Gnome and Wayland would have us believe, the desktops using Wayland and Gnome should be blazing fast and zooming.
Yet, users are reporting heavy lag on both X11 and Wayland. The issue clearly must lie in Gnome.

I notice too that Gnome releases are appearing at a much faster rate than ever before.
You just get the latest version installed when Gnome releases a new one. "Now, Gnome 48 available!" "Coming next week, the release of Gnome 500 (Not 50, get it right)."

The upwards development is a lot of pressure on the ZorinGroup. Within GnuLinux, there is all this internecine squabbling about which package manager or which desktop environment to dominate the landscape with and rise up on top of the pile.

Feedback like yours is what the end user must contend with and us all being caught in the middle of Gnomes ambitions and Canonicals ambitions pale in comparison to that Reality:

The End User Experience Is All That Matters.

To quote Linus Torvalds:

The biggest thing any program can do is not the technical details of the program itself; it’s how useful the program is to users.

So any time any program (like the kernel or any other project), breaks the user experience, to me, that’s the absolute worst failure that a software project can make.

The onus is on us to provide push-back pressure on the developers who want to assert their controls and dominance not only on us, but on the developers that we rely on like the ZorinGroup.

If I am a baker and the supplier available for flour changes how the grain is processed and changes the flour such that it changes my recipes and flavor, I will be on the front line of customer feedback, not the flour supplier.
Let's turn our heads to the elitists at the top and focus our attention on those who are pulling the strings.

Until then, i remain stably and happily on Zorin OS 16.3 Lite.
I do not have lag, Wayland, Snaps, Flatpaks or any other forced pains of ambition. Just a usable reliable desktop.

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Hahaha, GNOME 500! God, I hope not. I pictured a Warhammer 40k kind of world trying to navigate through GNOME 500. No wonder the Space Marines are always in a bad mood

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That is really too much. Did You tried to kill the Process? To do that open the System Monitor and look for the Process gnome-software. Click on it and end the Process. You will see that the Software Center Window disappear. When You open it again it starts new. Maybe it is better then.

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Thank you, Ponce-De-Leon, I did.

Just a bit of background, I've been trained as a Unix admin/developer by the US Air Force starting in 1991 and have used Linux, personally and professionally, since 1996.

I've tried all the fixes I could find online (restarting, reinstalling, etc.). I've had small problems with the Zorin OS software center before; however, nothing like this. Normally, I install via command line; however, I have to test out the Software center for about a dozen people that I convinced to buy Zorin OS 16 Pro. I'm in the process of notifying them of my problems and will tell them not to purchase 17 Pro until things get straightened out. None of them are technically proficient enough to handle these kind of problems, so I'm glad it's happening to me rather than them.

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You may want to play around with MX-Linux 23.1 KDE, or KDE neonuser. In respect of the latter I would download the iso from October last year. I recently got an update to Plasma 6 from Plasma 5.27 and ... could not log out, restart, shut down! Fortunately, within 3 days, they resolved this debacle!

Here's my neonuser desktop [Plasma (X11)]:

image
image1920×1080 107 KB

I was surprised to see that X11 is still an option at login as Plasma 6 devs were going to drop xorg but it is still there! Plasma (Wayland) is the other option at login.

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In the time since Aravisian wrote that, it is now GNOME 520! hehe :rofl:

I am sorry to say, I'm another one sticking to Z16.3 for the time being. It just works.

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I tried KDE Neon with Plasma 6 and Wayland and it works. I could Logout, restart etc. But it was only the pure System without greater Customizations or Adjustments.

As far as I understand that in the Past they didn't want it kick out. But Fedora have Plans for that. But even then You could install X11 from the Repo's.

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A quick internet search for "wayland is great" yields the opposite. When you make a biased search you get biased results.

cool, so the Wayland comment was entirely unrelated.

They also used GNOME-Software on 16.x :thinking:

Side-Effect of Packagekit, that is a project that ZorinOS doesn't maintain, and there currently is no upstream fix.

cd ~/.var/app/org.mozilla.firefox/ is probably the current path in use. Zorin OS currently ships the Mozilla Firefox Flatpak as it's officially supported by Mozilla and gets consistent updates. I believe ZorinOS has also switched to Offline Upgrades, so pre-installing Firefox as a deb would mean having to reboot the OS when using the GUI upgrade options, as apt updates are/would be applied offline.

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Back atcha'

Typing "wayland" into Google provides a lot of non-Linux related stuff; however, the first results are just information from wikis and the wayland project. The very first topic about wayland is entitled Think twice about wayland.

About as an unbiased search as you can conduct on Wayland and the items returned are not exactly a glowing endorsement.

It was WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYY worse under Wayland; unusable, I had to press the hardware reset button just to get back to the login screen.

Cool, so Wayland was horrible and X11 was bearable, but not really.

Yes, and it was much more user friendly and nicer. I did not purchase a product from GNOME developers, I purchased a product from Zorin OS developers and chose to seek assistance from Zorin OS official channels. If I buy a mixer from Target, I don't go to Walmart and complain, I return to Target. Now, Target did not make that mixer, but they sold it and will provide customer service, up to a certain point in time.

See above; if the product is not ready, due to items not under their control or otherwise, perhaps they should reconsider releasing it with their name attached to it.

First, a deb upgrade, alone, will not trigger a reboot. Or, it shouldn't It is not system (kernel et al.) related. I've updated Firefox on dozens of platforms and never once did Firefox trigger an update.

Second, Mozilla also officially supports the deb package installation.

Thank you for your response.

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The problem with biases is that they are omnipresent. We all have them. We often try to smooth them over by calling them something else like an opinion or an experience.
Recognizing a bias is one of the most helpful things that we as humans can ever do for ourselves.
Sadly, overcoming biases is much harder. We can mitigate them, but cannot fully eliminate them.

@anon2532484 makes a very valid point that we must narrow our searches to mitigate biases.
It is undeniable that there are many biases surrounding Wayland and trying to eliminate them is not just impossible, but astoundingly hair-pulling hopeless.
If we cannot eliminate the biases; we can only go by the evidence and mitigate biases as much as we can.

What evidence can we look at, that is as impartial as we can find, in regards to Waylands performance?
Are arguments for or against Wayland colored by desires or fallacies? Such as whether a user opposes it merely because they are claimed to fear what is new - Is Waylands newness indeed its Achilles heel? Such arguments touch on making personal assumptions about strangers, not the validity of the software.

The Problem with Wayland:

The biggest problem Wayland truly has is End User Experience. Whether it is supposedly more secure or whether it is supposedly unready falls to the side when we examine whether the End User is happy with the product. If the end user is not, then the only proper course of action is to nor force Wayland upon them.

Others persuading us that it is faster, better or preferred means little compared to End User experience.
Others persuading us that it is bad or poorly implemented is just as ineffective.

Fortunately, Zorin OS allows the choice- any user is able to switch to either at any time and test the display protocol for themselves.

What attracts me to Zorin OS is that I can change Zorin OS. I have many favorite Distros, but Zorin OS, ASMI and MX Linux are the only ones that I have tried that I can easily and effectively change at will. Even Mint has some locks on it and Elementary? Don't get me started. Using it feels like I am locked in a padded room and given a bopper toy to play with.

Feedback about the base you are using and rely on is critical to understanding the End User experience.

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I did narrow my search; I was having issues and needed to find where it was not performing to find potential fixes. In other words, had I searched:

Wayland is the bees knees and the most fantastic piece of software in the world

I probably wouldn't find any potential solutions to my problems.

However:

Wayland horrible performance

May provide more realistic results in order for me to address my issues. Bias is inherent in the search because of the issue, rather than an internal and personal bias. @anon2532484 implied that my bias was personal, or that's my take away.

Absolutely! I love that about Zorin OS. As you know, I'm not a fan of systemd, or GNOME, really, but Zorin OS is such a pleasant experience that I can overlook those two prejudices that I have. There's one caveat now: It's a pleasant experience with 16.x.

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Your point is completely valid. :grin:

I mean, if a person is searching the web in order to form an opinion about Wayland, avoiding leading terms is the way to go.

Whereas, when trying to troubleshoot and resolve an issue, using search terms that have the best chance of returning relevant hits is the way to go.

I have run Zorin OS with sysvinit, instead. The only reason I stopped was because most users use systemd, therefor service files; I needed to be able to examine that the instructions I give will work before providing them, so I tolerate Systemd. It works, for the most part. I do not ever have sound issues with pulseaudio. I consider myself quite lucky.
Gnome - even though Zorin OS 16 made Gnome usable even for me - I have my limits. I use Zorin OS Lite and I regularly run into trouble where I am uncertain about Gnome Settings or extensions and must ask for others to join in on a help thread to help a Gnome user.

Zorin 16 is the strongest Zorin OS yet, in my opinion. 12 was great, 15 was good - I think 17 is too new, with too much that is new, to fairly judge it just yet.
When Zorin OS 16 was initially released, it had quite a few teething troubles with getting it installed for many users, which resulted in a series of .iso revisions - and some users having luck with one revision, but not the other. We got used to suggesting users try the R1 .iso if the R2 didn't work, even though the R2 worked when R1 didn't for other users. Eventually, that all was sorted out by a final revision and it fades from memory.

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May I ask if you followed instructions? I would LOVE to try Zorin OS with openrc or runit! You just got me a little excited again.

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I followed a long series of some, along with having to figure a few things out. Swarfendor asked me to write up a guide on it, but by this point, I have actually forgotten a bunch of it and would have to go through the whole process all over again.

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I like MX-Linux and have been trying it on and off for a long time, since they first collaborated with antiX. I'm not a big fan of Plasma or KDE. I actually downloaded the MX-Linux Fluxbox, as I used to use that back in the early 2000s after blackbox went down. But, it just didn't feel right and I switched to Openbox, which I still love and use. Yet, it's not been actively developed for a long time.

That is a beautiful desktop. Here's my current Void Linux Openbox I just installed this morning:

2024-03-23_20-04
2024-03-23_20-041918×1080 249 KB

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I understand that developers have ideals they want to achieve and I don't think it's a good idea to deprive them of that motivation. However, I cannot tolerate the sacrifice of users for the sake of it. Because I believe that users in FOSS are not just consumers, but members of the community.

Contributing to the project involves not only coding, but also the kind of discussions we are having now. I believe that free software comes from free speech.

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Ah, the classic "Wayland breaks everything" github gist that has been shared and debunked a million times. The TL;DR to this post is "Wayland isn't 1:1 Xorg compatible and that sucks" even though Wayland was never advertised as such. Yes, it is intended to eventually replace Xorg and the X Windowing System, but it was not ever intended to be compatible. As you have mentioned further below (citing KDE Contributor's article "Does Wayland really break everything?") this is "by design" (although that terminology is not quite right)

Yes, there is what I would call a loud minority of people that do not quite understand what Wayland is and as such blame it and it's design for various things that are either 100% intended and have their reasons[1] or are a result of Wayland not being designed for the same usecase that the X Windowing System was when it was first envisioned (which was a different time entirely, graphics have changed lots since).

You

  1. Did not inintially mention that...at all
  2. Probably could've just checked the Settings or run a command, as I highly suspect it fell back to software rendering due to a bad driver.

This makes no sense because either way you're using GNOME-Software and paying for Zorin's support...that is it. Nothing has changed since then and saying that the software store in Zorin OS 16 was nicer or worked better[2] doesn't relate at all to the fact that it's GNOME Software. It was back then, it still is now.

Just to question your stance, what else exactly is Zorin supposed to do?
They do not have the resources to maintain PackageKit themselves, or develop an alternative to that backend. They also do not have the resources to build their own software-store frontend that doesn't rely on PackageKit. To me it is honestly a miracle they were able to get Zorin 17 out during Ubuntu 22.04's support window[3]

No, that is not what Offline upgrades are.

Offline Upgrades allows your Init System (usually systemd) to take action on system updates on the next boot.[4] Without adding extra information to every single package, anything that is installed by apt is considered a "system update". If you install Firefox through apt and make use of Offline Upgrades, you won't have an updated firefox until you either

  1. Apply the update manually from the CLI
  2. You reboot, and let Offline Upgrades do it's thing.

Yes, but Flatpak is a lot nicer to work with from a developers' perspective here as you do not have to worry nearly as much about a misconfigured repository (which could happen due to a myriad of random reasons) breaking other packages on the system-level. Flatpak simply doesn't touch that, it isn't designed to.

  1. like "we don't replicate X11 because that is literally what we are trying to replace, of course we don't just make X11 2: Electric Boogaloo". Ties in well with the "wayland breaks everything" guy just making a bunch of unofficial Wayland extensions that just 1:1 replicate X11/Xorg features ↩︎

  2. which many people here definitely would never agree with, especially moderators and active users which troubleshooted issues with it daily ↩︎

  3. not meant as disrespect towards the developers ↩︎

  4. It is kind of comparable to the dreaded windows updates you know, but you aren't forced to do them like on Windows. ↩︎