The Road to Zorin 16

It is an old Centrino Duo laptop. No Nvidia or other exotic graphics. Video Controller is Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950.

I have also found that USB persistence is still not working on 16Beta, as reported on 16Alpha. So my alsamixer tweak (which I still have to do to get sound to work through internal speakers) and other setting changes are not retained between boots.

Other feedback comments:
In 15.3 Core, I have a dark background taskbar (semi transparent) with a light theme. I can't seem to achieve that in 16Beta. I can't remember if I did it using gnome tweaks on 15.

It was possible to change desktop icon size by right click and dragging a corner. On Z16Beta it appears we now only get choice of "Tiny" and 3 other preset choices of icon size.

Hello, @anon37206250...

According to @AZorin's post above, a direct upgrade from Zorin OS 15 to 16 won't be available for several months (until a thorough testing period of 16 has been completed).

In the meantime, we have to download Zorin OS 16 Beta and perform a clean install.

Also, be sure to read the warning that's on the download page before installing it (screen shot below):

Good luck :zorin:.

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I tried reducing Persistence to 1024MB on the USB with Z16 Core Beta, but still cannot lauch Zorin Live disk with normal graphics. I have 2.5GB RAM.

Glad I could help you out. I would stop using Gnome too if I was unable to hide the top bar hahahaha

And thanks for your help, I followed your instructions and Xscreensaver is working properly under Z16, will try it on 15.3 later today.

I think that the only glitch I have is that Xscreensaver does not respect Caffeine. Screensavers still show up when Caffeine is turned on.

Apart from that, I really loved the extra screensavers. Particularly Pacman, UnknownPleasures, and m6502.

Thank you

Mr. Harvey:

You do such a good job of showing pictures, it really helps. The first thing that concerns me, is 13% CPU usage from CPU core 5. If your system was idling and supposedly doing nothing, 13% is not nothing, are you sure the system wasn't updating or anything?

1.6GB of RAM usage is excellent believe it or not, I don't think your system is using much RAM at all, was the screenshot taken right away after boot, or after the system has been running for hours?

I did think it was odd that your available RAM was 30.9GB, as that goes against standards, until I saw just bellow, that you have like 1.3GB of RAM cashed lol. RAM caching is probably speeding up the OS a bit ha?

Also, I see you have one of those Asus TUF computer's. I saw them suddenly show up on Amazon, and then suddenly disappeared after a couple weeks. People have been buying a ton of them lol.

How do you like that Ryzen 7 4800H CPU? Does it perform good for your uses? It was clear you have an 8-core CPU when I saw resource monitor showing 16 cores lol. But your terminal info is not displaying the CPU threads, I wanna know dang it lol.

I see you are using the same GPU driver I am Nvidia 460.67 driver. I also noticed your using the new refreshed GPU in the 16 series, the 1660, that is known to be a good GPU according to my man Linus, from Linus Media Group.

I also see your using the 5.8 kernel, which should be working perfectly with your hardware, I'd be surprised if it were not! I am still wondering to this day, why 10GIGABIT ethernet has not become standard on notebooks yet. Usually its just 1GIGABIT like mine, most I've seen on a notebook was 2GIGABIT.

I also see your running two-Samsung 970 EVO's, those are very nice SSD drives, very fast, and you got a total of 2TB storage because of them, nice! I actually have space in my notebook for another NVME SSD drive, but with prices on them as they are, I am holding off.

I don't know many people who would be will to dump 200 dollars or more into a hard drive, so ya lol. OK, I do not like where your CPU temps are idling at! I need to post a screenshot to show you my CPU idle temps in comparison.

Your core temps are far too high for idling, which also points to the 14% CPU usage in core 5. Its my recommendation that you get a notebook cooler, thats what is helping to keep my temps down. But I also recommend finding out what is eating the CPU usage.

Is there an issue tracker for Zorin 16 beta so we can see the number of issues and what they are? Just trying to figure out if there is a way to see how development is progressing and what needs to be done to reach stable release.

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Yeah, I am curious about the same. I really want to support this project but it is hard to me to fit in this kind of support. Previously I was Manjaro user for few years, and I was familiar with every step of development, bugs and news.

Also ,my thinking , why completely free distros have best support and ones with paying,donating , premium distros have lack of support, forum activity and developers activity ..hm

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Thx! I just discovered and installed this incredible collection of ScreenSavers to give some pizzazz to rather pathetic selection in Zorin v15.3 Lite. I am really enjoying the beautiful/iconic Xmatrix version.

It makes me look forward to taking a 15min break so I can watch it and imagine I am Neo! (Covid already makes sure I am in a dystopian world)

Has anyone experienced this?


suddenly appeared this morning.

The Zorin Group is working to develop and implement the Direct Upgrade option and what you are seeing in that notification is that option. Personally, I would not attempt that option until it says Zorin OS 16.something and after the Zorin Group confirms that the direct upgrade is in full working order.
But by the Zorin Group adding into the Focal Repository, and setting the updater Upgrade Option to "normal", the updater will see it.

Thanks for posting this, as it may be that the Zorin Group is not comfortably ready for that to appear. @azorin and @zorink would have to opine on that...

I am confused. why did this suddenly appear? is this right or wrong?

I am not really sure if it is intended to be visible in the Updater, yet. As to why it is appearing; It will appear in the Updater as long as the packages are available in the repository and the Upgrade Settings are set to "normal" instead of set to "never."

The ZorinGroup has not stated that the Direct Upgrade Option is ready for use, yet.

It appears that you may have altered the base repositories or modified a system configuration file to unofficially enable release upgrades. We would strongly recommended against performing this upgrade as it's likely to break the system.

We're planning to introduce an official direct upgrade patch from Zorin OS 15 to 16 a few months after the initial release of Zorin OS 16 this summer, after a thorough testing period has been completed.

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thanks for the information. i have reinstalled zorin os and it's back to normal. the update does not appear.

Any news about next release?

That last anyone has heard, Zorin 16 Core final Release was set for end of June or Early July.

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Hello:
That's right, Zorin Os 16 is expected to be available between June 30 and July 15, according to the information provided by the developers.
Regards

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Is there a newest news about Zorin 16?

Hello:
The latest information I have is that they are in the last stage: translation of the operating system. By virtue of what has happened in previous versions, we would be very close to the release of the stable version.
Regards

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https://twitter.com/ZorinOS/status/1407092287931359241 This might help.
Zorin OS translation - POEditor localization platform Link to translate Zorin OS

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