Well, I'm glad I haven't bought a Pro version. The performance of Zorin Core 18 is atrocious. Its slow, it conks out all the time on simple tasks, and running more than 1 task at a time is impossible. The Brave browser is so sketchy as to be useless, and more often than not freezes the entire system. Installing new software (e.g. Chrome) takes an age.
I tried out 17.3, and was fairly happy, but the promise of 18 with the more subtle integration of things like OneDrive was a real draw to upgrade. My intent was to eventually move away from Windows entirely, and run Zorin on my laptop for all my tasks. Unfortunately, the experience with 18 has put a real downer on that idea.
Just so readers are aware, I am running it on an i7 gen10 CPU, with 8GB RAM and two 1.5Tb HDD, so its a fairly good if a little old set of hardware, that runs other distros pretty well.
I am almost certainly going to have to stick with Windows for my main OS, and keep looking for a Linux distro which suits me (and the hardware) better.
Whenever I read one of the many threads commenting on Gnome being sluggish, my brain immediately flits to the announcement of sunsetting Zorin OS Lite because Gnome has improved so much...
What I've been learning over the years, is each new release of Zorin OS with Gnome, requires more resources to run, and in that way, its kind of like Windows in that regard. But alas, as its always been through history, for many decades.
Thing is, nobody normal expects a 2025 OS, to run on a computer from the 1980's, 1990's, and even year 2000 machine. And if you go backwards, it ends up being the same way.
Nobody expects Windows XP, to run a 2025 computer, because it was an OS made for 32-bit CPU's with between 128MB, to 4GB of RAM. Its important to keep expectations relative.
Final note, Zorin OS 18 Lite should release in a month or so, be patient, its coming, and will likely run better on your machine. So, thats good news if your looking for some.
Sorry but Gen10 i7 is not an old CPU... It has been released in 2020... it has only 5 years... No sense of talking about Zorin Lite!
@shovelsr should consider at least 16GB of RAM and - if the 2 HDDs are really HDDs - should absolutely upgrade to SSD, but the system should run like hell.
Hello. I mostly run Zorin 18 in virtual machine but i guess we can compare performances with Ubuntu 24.04 defaut Gnome. If so ; my daughter use Ubuntu 24.04 on a i5 laptop Lenovo T460, SSD, 16 gio of RAM. It runs as fast and good as expected even for some little games, Gimp, Krita, Sweet Home 3D ... SSD and some RAM is maybe a way to go ?
Regards
Zorin 18 is billed as the Linux Distro to capture Windows 10 users at that OS's end of life. As such, I would expect it to run well on the hardware I am installing it on (which ran W10 without any issues at all). The suggestions to upgrade to SSD are not really helpful. The drives I have (both HDD) are more than fast enough, so I should not need to upgrade, which is one of the premises of the team - use old hardware when MS pull Win 10.
Z17 ran well enough, but the additional facilities in Z18 lured me in, however, it is very disappointing!
So I am trashing Z18, and will return to 17 (or give something like Bodhi a try), with WINE and OneDrive packages from the repos.
Zorin OS 18 is based on Ubuntu 24. Sadly, Microsoft pushing users to invest in new hardware is not limited to Windows OS.
It is on GnuLinux, too, and many forces behind the scenes, like Red Hat, Gnome, Canonical and the institution of Wayland are all geared toward pushing for newer hardware.
Even Linux articles make it a strong point to push words like "Polished" and "Modern" to pressure the end users. Pressing that anything that is not the latest looks "dated and ugly." Riiiight. It's being pushed - everywhere.
The Gnome Foundation claimed that at their current rate of progress, they predict that the upcoming Gnome versions will work as well as XFCE.
Independent benchmarking does not support this claim.
Yet, due to this claim, Zorin OS is dropping XFCE, with 18 being the last release reported to include Zorin OS Lite.
Now, with the advent of Zorin OS 18, I am seeing many new threads - all making the same complaint.
I think the developers need to take this seriously.
You should give PCLOS-Debian Plasma a try. It does not use systemd as its init system and does not use Plasma's 'Discover' (equivalent of Gnome Software) but uses Synaptic Package Manager which is much more efficient. It is my daily driver:
I was using Fedora 15 when Gnome came out, in 2011 i guess. Compare to Gnome 2 and even Unity, Gnome 3 was kind of HEAVY for modest hardware. Since this time Gnome made great efforts to improve their system ; at home we have different hardware and it runs quite well, but on this point Kde Plasma 5 made great job, even better than Gnome - as far as i tried.
But Zorin and free software are not powerful as this compagny. Yes Zorin claim so, but i guess the team still need help and support. As far as i tried (i use Linux since 16 years), Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, Fedora, Opensuse and Zorin, for instance, made great job to help people migrate from Windows to Linux. It's not perfect, but we can help also, make reports, help others, promote and explain why free software is a better way to go.
If Zorin 17 works, so it's fine until this version is supported. You can also give a try to Lighter environments and distro such as Mate, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Lite, Linux Mint Xfce, etc.
Hope you find a solution with Free Software.
In my testing I have had much worse performance on the desktop (just general, basic computing) versus any other Zorin version. This is mostly due to Wayland, but the funny thing is if I test Zorin 17 on my system with Wayland enabled versus 18, the difference is night and day. I could use Wayland on 17 all day long (minus the obvious feature discrepancy that comes up once in a while). So i'm not sure exactly what has happened, but something has changed between the two versions to create a VERY noticeable lag on the desktop.
I was hopeful (perhaps naively) that the newer versions would improve things somewhat, but it appears to have only made things worse (for my system). I hope that this is just perhaps an extension misbehaving... but whatever it is, should be figured out.
That's the impression I got from passively reading the barrage of "slow" posts since 17.3. It's generally fact of Linux life that newer versions get slower and slower, for example Puppy Linux from around 2019 can do wonders to old hardware, while the latest are unusable now.
Upgrading from a traditional HDD to even the cheapest SSD is a night-and-day difference, your system will run ten times faster. I often service clients who still use HDDs, and over time, those drives become sluggish, especially after heavy read/write use or when reinstalling the operating system. Personally, I always recommend Samsung SSDs for their reliability and performance.
I’ve also learned that some applications are programmed differently to handle read and write operations on SSDs versus HDDs. I’m not sure if that’s related to Zorin 18 possibly dropping support for older hard drives, but it might be a factor.
In my own experience, having an SSD or M.2 drive for the operating system and a secondary HDD for storage sometimes slows down system responsiveness, this happens to me on windows, not sure on linux. I
