Hi! I am waking up from my sleep to ask you users what you think about the new release.
1 Like
I have to say, for me it did have a wow factor. I've been on a a variety of Gnome 4x systems, now, including Manjaro, Nobara, Fedora, Arch, openSUSE, Reborn, Arco, and the Gnome experience is pretty much all the same. But none of them has felt so smooth and snappy as Zorin17's take. It really was a WOW for me.
Also the theming. Gnome seems very polished and well themed already, you wouldn't expect much difference after having tried it on so many different distros and it being largely the same. But Zorin17's dark theme especially, I like it a lot, wow. I really like what they managed to pull out of it.
What's not so wow is the software availability, it feels like a downgrade from Zorin16. No snaps integrated, no Firefox deb. package. I'm still really hoping they're gonna change that for the final release.
Still, I'm very excited for the full release.
2 Likes
On the surface, it's a smaller update then expected. This release is less about bringing hundreds of new features but rather updating the OS' underlying architecture, optimization and bug fixes.
As @337harvey said, it doesn't have the "WOW Factor", where the OS is so majorly redesigned and improved that you're astonished, but all the improvements that are there are good, and everything that GNOME 43 brought with it is also nice to have.
On top of that, the performance is surprisingly good for being GNOME 43
3 Likes
I still prefer Plasma. 
1 Like
I have also been struggling with this Wow factor.
Zorin OS 16 brought that "wow" due to it including Right Click Taskbar controls on Gnome Desktop. That it offered Zorin Connect.
Zorin OS 16 brought useful features as well as massive improvements to the user experience that we could see and touch.
Zorin OS 17 has brought improvements that are more under the hood and for this reason, that surface visible "Wow" is not as present.
I really like that members point out that this does not mean that it is actually lacking and helps us to look at the things we otherwise might not notice.
5 Likes
One thing that impressed me was also that all the touchpad gestures worked right out of the box despite running on nvidia drivers. This has not worked on any other distro. It has to do with Gnome disabling Wayland on nvidia drivers, but the gestures only working on Wayland. I usually could decide not to run the nvidia drivers or not to have the gestures. But here it's all running perfectly, with nvidia drivers installed.
3 Likes
It makes sense to me, the main reason I started using zorin was because of the hype around zorin 16, in many articles and posts what most people said was that zorin always wanted to create something new and unique (for users new, coming from Windows and Mac) and that something is finally achieved with 16, for me it is logical that the changes in future versions are less and less noticeable at first glance. I have seen little of the 17 but so far it meets my expectations
3 Likes
Well I was excited the same with Zorin 16 when first time linux can working without problem be installing on my metal bare hardware and I can quit from windows.
Now after testing a plenty linux distributions and get more experience it isn't the same. I will be waiting for new version of course.
I think that while Z17 looks almost the same as the previous version, but for someone who has been using vanilla Gnome most of the year it's quite impressive to see how they've made it happen. I'm very pleased on that front, and also happy that they are including cool eye-candy effects like that spatial navigation.
4 Likes
I'm with @zenzen on this one. After using vanilla Gnome - Zorin 17 is a bless and I don't have to fight Gnome to bend it to my will.
4 Likes
Exactly, I switch Zorin to vanilla Gnome layout immediately, and I think they made it look very awesome.
Actually I love vanilla Gnome. It's the most functional DE for me. I feel slowed down and disabled on other DEs. Even on Zorin I switch to vanilla Gnome layout. This is also why I would drop Zorin OS, should it ever drop Gnome.
1 Like
I installed Debian 12 with XFCE a while back and, oh boy does it look horrible... I would still have to see how other DE's are without any customizations but for now Gnome is far ahead with flying colors in terms of out of the box experience.
2 Likes
I liked this customization Orchis GTK Theme.
20 posts were split to a new topic: XFCE D.E. theme debate
A post was merged into an existing topic: XFCE D.E. theme debate
Rather extensive tangent about XFCE theme opinions moved to its own thread due to this thread being about Gnome 43 on Zorin OS Core.
I'm super impressed with it. It gets core stack up to parity with most other distros, and the user experience is as good as Zorin 16.
It's Ubuntu with a much more attractive coat of paint on the top and all the "Top 10 things you must try when you install Ubuntu" kinds of tasks already carried out, plus a good number of things that I appreciate like the Microsoft-compatible fonts, Nvidia drivers available in the live environment, Wine ready to go out of the box, Windows-esque shortcuts enabled by default (like WIN+E to launch Files app). Basically every little thing that I stumbled with when I first tried giving a Linux distro a go in my work environment.
Honestly I had very little to moan about with v16 anyway, all I wanted was a more up-to-date GNOME, and here it is.
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.