Howdy folks, I am running 4 devices with Zorin OS paired with various DE's. heres what i use and why.
1st, Gaming Rig, NVIDIA 2060 RTX + i5, 10400F x 12
Zorin OS 18 (Gnome) X11
I did run into some regular software i use refuse to run on Wayland
I use Gnome on my main gaming PC (because i have an abundance of ram and a beefier cpu/gpu then my other machines.)
Dell Lattitude E7470, Zorin OS 18 + Budgie (I travel for work this travels with me for moderate-light gaming and media)
Uses half as much ram and is more forgiving on my CPU that Gnome was 2.7 down to 1.6.
Budgie's Raven is pretty neat I like the idea quite alot, its a solid OOTB experience, and it looks pretty modern despite being light on resources.
Microsoft Surface Pro 4 Zorin OS 18 with Gnome + Surface Kernal
This machine is where i do my day to day budgeting, shopping, planning, tracking things, i frequently use it as a tablet to do random things in places more comfertable then anywhere else, Gnome felt the best in terms of on screen keyboard etc.
HP Thinclient T520 (iirc), Modified to use an external SSD+HDMI instead of DP, Zorin OS Lite with XFCE
This little machine is my minecraft server, and it runs pretty well with that purpose, XFCE is dated in my opinion but can be modernized with time and effort. XFCE was my first desktop enviroment thanks to unintenionally installing Peppermint OS instead of Linux Mint and originally triggering bit locker on the lattitude a few years back lol.
I have some old machines lying Dormant at the moment.
A Chaintek (I think) motherboard with an AMD 400 MHz Processor, 384 Mb RAM and graphics I can't quite remember with Win 98 SE on it. SoundBlaster with 12 Mb RAM.
Next, an AOpen server tower, with an Asus Motherboard with 1Gb of Memory dual-booting Windows 7 Pro 32-bit and Zorin 6 Ultimate 32-bit with an AMD Athlon 64 Processor, about 1.7 Ghz. Linux compatible Sound card.
My youngest's defunct iCute mid-Tower awaiting rebuild with Win XP Pro for offline gaming. MSI Motherboard with bad onboard USB ports which was decried by MSI forum admin who blatantly claimed nothing wrong with MSI's USB port after I reported issues. 2.2 GHz AMD Processor, 2 Gb RAM Max and an obscure graphics card if memory serves. For offline gaming.
My daily rig is built inside a CoolerMaster Silencio 650 Case, with an ASUS Prime X470-PRO with a Ryzen 7 1700X CPU, cooled with a Noctua NH-D15 (can't fit the second fan due to location of RAM), 16 Gb (2 x 8 Gb Corsair RAM), Asus Blu-Ray DVD burner. On the new main drive (hardly used) is Windows 10 Pro, an update from Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. SoundBlaster Audigy Rx 5.1 surround sound card.
Zotac GT1030 with 2 Gb RAM
My main usage is the HotSwap Bay running PCLOS Debian KDE Plasma 5.27.5, with a Win 10 styled menu.
Second Hot Swap drive has Q4OS which I used to create the Unofficial Manual for Zorin 18 Core using SoftMaker Office 2024.
Main Software used:
Office
SoftMaker Office 2024
(Beta Testing SoftMaker 2026 NX, but not had much time to test it with everything else happening)
Used for creating hard to come by adapted books for students with loIvision.
Evolution (e-mail client).
LIOS (Linux Intelligent OCR Solution) for reading and extracting text from .pdf files.
ocrmypdf comnand line tool.
pdftk for repairing pdfs
pdfArranger for merging, rearranging, deleting pages from a pdf.
Okular for viewing pdfs, extracting Text, Images and Tables into TextMaker.
VueScan Pro for scanning documents and photos.
pdfStudio Pro 2024 for editing pdfs and compressing.
Graphics
GIMP
Inkscape
(Most recently used to create Tactile Diagrams of the latest UK coins (not to scale) with a Braille description of the reverse side of the coins following a request on the UK's VI Forum by QTVI's (Qualified Teacher of the Visually Impaired).
You will not see Braille as the Cloud Store does not hold my Braille Font.
Gaming
Solitaire
Wesnoth 1.18
Internet
Zen Browser (fork of Firefox)
Vivaldi (only used very rarely for financial stuff).
My Amiga 1500 I am trying to sell (buyer never showed) together with Amiga CD 32 games console with Communicator III to connect to Amiga, and Weird Science to connect Amiga to PC. Has 2 Amiga Floppy drives, upgraded Kickstart ROM 3.1 that I installed with Workbench 3.1, an Oktagon 2008 SCSI controller with a 1 Gb Seagate SCSI Drive and 4 Mb ZIP RAM.
Almost forgot, the iCute mid-Tower, with MSI 2 GHz AMD single Athlon 64-bit Processor, 2 Gb RAM (maxed out), EVGA 512 Mb silent Graphics 512 Mb 8x AGP with Q4OS on it as main use for M'lady who never uses it - styled as Windows 10.
On another drive Windows XP and Windows 7 Pro Ultimate 32-bit. Originally built in 2006.
I have a framework 13 laptop with an AMD chip. It has 32gb of ram. I have two drives one partitioned for windows and a /home partition, with / on the second drive, running anduin os.
I moved away from zorin after reading this forum and seeing how uncertain the expectations of the future of the distro are, and how little the devs communicate. It's a nice os, but I just felt it was time to move.
It will save me a lot of typing, to just post the link to my computer and upgrades.
Suffice to say, its a performance gaming machine that still holds up today, as it can play Doom The Dark Ages, which is far newer of a game then the computer, and my machine can still pump out 4K resolution for that game.
Previous main rig:
9700k, 32gb 3200mt/s, RTX 2070S, Windows 10 LTSC.
This one is for gaming and on Windows cause nvidia drivers freaked out one day last year on Zorin 17 and frustration ensued.
Server:
Z440, Xeon 2698v3, 16x6 8x2 112gb 2133mt/s ECC, Proxmox 9.1
My server has several VM's on it, and 5 NIC's. 2 on an Intel X540 and PCIe passthrough for PfSense, Ubuntu servers for NTP, JellyFin, pivpn, pihole, Squid proxy, smb/nfs shares.
Luanti server (work in progress):
Intel 6600, 32gb 2400mt/s, Intel B50, Zorin 18.1 Pro.
I'm pretty sure this is over specced but most of the parts were free hand-me-downs from my Dad (thanks Dad!). I was trying to use it for LLM's but the PCIe gen can't saturate the B50 and I have issues with passing through the GPU to open-web-ui and other popular LLM integrated web pages. Too many projects ongoing to dig into it more.
Raspberry Pi 1 A or B (I don't know if this works, but I like looking at it)
Raspberry Pi 4, 4gb, 8gb with Raspbian
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with Raspbian
Raspberry Pi 5 8gb with LAKKA
Tons of old computers and stuff:
HP lga 2011 with intel 3820, P4 630 HT Dell system on BTX, P4 S478 clamshell Dell, Dell XPS with Intel 920, AMD 5600+ with Mint, tons of lga 775 stuff, some lenovo desktops, random other stuff. I'm not a hoarder, I promise. When something breaks, it goes in the broken stuff bucket, which is really close to the trash can.
