Hi everyone,
New Zorin person here. I have been distro hopping for about 15 years now, and my story probably isn't very different for most of you, switching from the likes of Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, and my personal favorite RIP #!. I am a psychology major in college (switching to tech, we all make mistakes when were young) and I wanted to talk about the psychological effect of not valuing something based off the price you pay for it. Not exactly the "endowment effect" but I like to think of it as something that most of us got to experience it first-hand, let me explain.
Do you remember going to the store/mall as a kid and stopping into your local music store/FYE and looking through the CDs? Click clacking your way through genres you hate to get to what you want, and you find it. The CD from your favorite artist that just came out, the yellow sticker on the back says $17 as you check your pocket for however much your parents gave you for food/entertainment before they dropped you off. Of course you paid it, excited to get home and play it on repeat for weeks, you KNEW you were getting your $17 worth. That one CD, to you, was worth $17 for maybe 9 songs and you'd happily pay it again to listen to a good album for the first time ever.
Fast forward to today and you can pay $9 per month for 12 trillion songs, knowing youll never listen to .000001% of the entire collection you have. In fact, chances are that you still listen to all the songs you loved as kid, on repeat. Now that such a large collection of music is available to you, on-demand, that CD is now not worth $17, let alone 17 cents, as you browse collections of artists, skipping through songs that don't pull you in within the first 10 seconds.
This leads me to distros. The availability of so many distros has allowed me to install almost anything I want, and if within 5 minutes I dont like one setting, or one program doesnt work, I just wipe everything and go to something else. 15 minutes of downloading an ISO is somehow easier than 3 minutes of forum searching to fix the issue that made you switch in the first place. You have no reason to be invested in something that you didn't pay any money for, other than personal preference. Entire forums are created as areas for users to find help, but not even considered by some people when a full wipe will probably fix whats wrong. I am no linux master by any means, but it has always been a "side project" for me to play around in.
Now, I'm taking HTML classes, building a home lab, getting my A+ and security+ certs and I know I'll need to learn linux, its an inevitability. I sat down and told myself that it's time to force myself into this rabbit hole. I have a windows rig for gaming, a macbook for general portability/paper writing (love the build quality, I feel if Zorin ever made their own laptop it would be nice and aluminum and feel premium) and I have a thinkpad for programming and linux use. I get bored easy, hell im bored this far into this long thread, but I know ill never truly invest my time into something until I spend money on it. I never ever tried Zorin before I bought the pro license, but from the videos I watched, I knew I would like it. So $40 to force myself to learn a useful skill, while contributing to the devs/community, and hoping that they continue to update this OS to make my life easier, which is really what technology is all about.
Thanks for reading, and I am glad to be here
-Neil