Newby feedback on installing Zorin 16 core

[adrianstephens]

I've recently been attempting to move from Windows 10 to linux. Came across Zorin, and I like it. I though you might be interested in what I found.

I'm a retired software engineer, and am happy to use the command line, but I do like the desktop environment too.

My zorin is installed on a 1TB nvme with two zfs pools, but not using the automatic zfs installation - I installed it on a regular drive and then transferred it to zfs, because I've found that zsys is buggy and doesn't reliably achieve what is was set out to do.

My biggest two complaints are sound devices and printers. I have a usb printer (Canon MX920 series) that is attached also on the LAN, resulting in two detected printers. Sometimes one works, sometimes the other, sometimes neither.

And then there's sound devices. Pulse appears to randomly change the default ("fallback") sound devices even though I'm not changing the hardware. Some applications support pulse audio very poorly (e.g. Audacity) and some very well (e.g. Zoom).

And then I have random crashes and freezes. I though linux was supposed to be more robust. But running Recoll (a document indexer) to index a 40GB document collection mounted via NFS fairly reliably causes the system to lock up - mouse moves, but no action, and can't ssh in. Indexing the collection locally, and copying it from NFS repeatedly doesn't cause a problem.

I was able to find substitutes for almost all my essential applications: digikam replaces faststone, Recoll replaces lookeen, libre office replaces Microsoft office. However, I do have one essential application that has to run on Windows and doesn't run on Wine. Therefore, I'm forced to continue to run Windows. I made a qemu-kvm virtual machine for the purpose and had to buy licenses for Windows and office to install it (couldn't move my old Windows machine to new virtualised hardware, even though I tried really hard).

I realize none of the above are Zorin issues. I'm going to stick with the OS. Thank you to the Zorin team for putting together a clean user-interface and package.

Adrian Stephens, Cambridge, UK.

[zabadabadoo]

Hi Adrian and welcome to the forum. Can I ask that you edit your forum profile to add which flavour of ZorinOS you have i.e. Z16 Core. That will help us better support you going forward.

As you have posted in General Help section rather than Feedback, I assume you are looking for help with your sound and Canon printer issues.

For sound, can you go to terminal and enter alsamixer
Check which sound card (if you have more than one) is set as default there. Use [F6] to change.
Whilst on alsamixer, check if any sound channels are unexpectedly set muted [MM] and unmute if needed. Also the Auto-Mute setting.

As for your Canon MX920 printer connected on both LAN and USB, others may be better placed to help you.

If you wish to websearch the issue, as ZorinOS 16 is based on Ubuntu 20.04, you can substitute that in your search string to receive more hits.

[DeanG]

The printer issue is something that gets under my skin as I remember almost 20 years people were screaming to get companies to release Linux drivers. Fast forward to 2021, most companies release them and nobody does anything with them. SMH.... We need something like a utility that Brother makes for Windows on Linux. I have the same issue where my printer appears twice ( I'm not sure why either) and it's a network printer.

I also put Windows into a Virtual Box because I still need Outlook since none of the email clients handle exchange as well on Linux. Plus I use Adobe Pro and I just do all my printing and scanning through the Brothers Utility on Windows and save myself the aggravation. I use a company where I pay like $10 for the license key for Windows 10 Pro so I'm not really bothered by that.

Yes, Pulse is an issue with audio but that may be a thing of the past as distros are going to be switching the handling to Pipewire