Not really. I'm looking for the philosophy behind and if the distro is minimalist in its approach of setting a distro together. Some distros thinks it's better to through everything and the kitchen sink as default set up - those distro I avoid. I want less = better.
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I voted keep GNOME because in my opinion and experience KDE Plasma and Budgie are both still unstable.
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I voted keep GNOME because I'm dealing with enough change already. Plus I don't know the others well enough to judge them.
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I wonder if many members ignore the keep XFCE Option because they think it is asking to replace Gnome with XFCE instead of Keeping Zorin OS Lite.
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I think to say that Plasma is unstable isn't correct, but can understand why that might be assumed, based on my experience with KDE neonuser spin. I have found 5.27 to be the most stable and not looking forward to being shoehorned into any OS that forces me to use Wayland or a kernel that is too high to run on old hardware. And to avoid e-waste I particularly like distributions that offer lighter environments and still support i386 (32-bit) architecture, such as Trinity Desktop Environment that Q4OS has to offer. M'lady's Athlon 64 single processor rig from 2006 is just about coping with Q4OS Plasma 5.27. I think at some point it may need replacing with Q4OS Trinity 32-bit offering (also available in 64-bit). I normally dislike xfce, but PCLOS Debian's rendition is nicely done. Lastly (but not only) is Devuan 5 ('daedulus') which also uses xfce by default, and available as 32-bit and free of systemd bloatware.
That was actually my Intention behind that. Zorin seems to want focus on one Desktop Environment (that is a Reason for only one Vote). And they decided for Gnome. So, I want for this Voting give the Option to vote for the xfce (Lite) Desktop.
I mean, it might be realistic that the Zorin Team decides to change their Mind and keep xfce instead of Gnome. But for an open What-if-when Action and because there seem to be not less People who use it, I list it to vote for it.
But I maybe, I could made it more clear when I would had used the Points:
- Keep Zorin Core (Gnome)
- Keep Zorin Lite (xfce)
But to avoid Irritations, I will let it be like it is. And for me it looks like the People seem to understand.
Quite happy with Zorin defaults... but then, not know much about this stuff anyway
Since Zorin OS ships with a customized GNOME anyway, I voted for GNOME. It looks best and is super user-friendly.
I wouldn't have said so if it were vanilla GNOME. I personally don't like the look of XFCE or Cinnamon, and KDE, while infinitely customizable, can easily be overwhelming to new users (less is more, whether you believe it or not 
).
Plus, my own experience with KDE has been less than stellar. It always seems to conflict with its own settings. (But it's a hot topic of debate, so let's not go there...)
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Gnome - there are features to help Microsoft customers transition (already in Ubuntu) such as One Drive integration, but not in the current ZorinOS as it is running an earlier version of Gnome
Shouldn't Keep Gnome and Keep xfce count as one cause everything else involves switching to a specific DE?
No. It is about one Desktop. And that includes these 2, too. So, Gnome or xfce.
I voted for GNOME but only because COSMIC was not listed. Obviously COSMIC is not ready to ship, but once it is, that would be pretty nice. But really, as long as it "looks about the same" I doubt most of us truly care; at which point it would be more about what is easiest for your team to design and maintain.
I wonder how much effort goes into fixing the gnome DE so it's not total garbage, which the Zorin devs could invest in other places?
I also wonder how many of the people who voted "keep gnome" have actually, seriously, used vanilla gnome and realise just how much Zorin modify it? It's almost unrecognisable until you open Settings!
Vanilla gnome is (or was, last time I distro-hopped being ~2 years ago) one of the best for supporting trackpad and touch gestures for laptops / tablets, but is practically unusable without Gnome Tweaks and at least a half-dozen Extensions. If all you want to do is open a browser, then it's fine, but so is literally any other DE, because you're not using the DE. If you want to use your computer, and especially if you don't use a trackpad or touchscreen. then vanilla gnome is one of the worst out there, IMO.
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I've used it with OpenSUSE, Fedora 37 and Debian 12, with only one extension: Rounded Corners. Although I did eventually install a different theme and icon set, just to make it look nicer as you can see from the screenshots I link above.
In fact, with the recent release of Debian 13, which uses the latest Gnome 48, I'm actually looking forward to giving it a try. There's been a lot of improvements.
The extension system could be much better. But I do like the idea of having a relatively simple system that is extensible, as opposed to having all of the options all at once, like in KDE. With Cosmic coming around soon, I think Gnome will have no option but to start working on improving this extension system to remain competitive.
I voted to keep XFCE, that was before I realized Lite was on its way out, after the OS 18 version is released. Infact, many thought there was not going to be an OS Lite, after OS 17, so consider were lucky to get one last version of Lite, with OS 18.
Starting with OS 19, its only going to be Gnome though. I've heard nothing but bad things about Gnome post 40+ version. They got rid of the ability to use extensions, to make the OS utterly useless. The Zorin team will have to make huge adjustments, in order to make OS 18 useful.
I don't quite see what benefits there are to change the desktop environment at this point in time.
ZorinOS is geared towards getting users of other operating systems acclimatized to linux quickly, and they have spent a significant amount of work towards that, by making the taskbar and other things feel familiar. (See here)
To me they succeeded more than any other linux desktops I've tried. When I install zorin and set it to its windows mode - I feel at home. No other Desktop environment (even with modifications) managed to do that.
I feel the community is served better if the Zorin Team can focus on getting releases done quicker so we get a quicker release cycle than 1+ years after ubuntu releases the newest LTS.
Yes - Jammy is still two years away from end of service, but when I start getting issues with software that wants newer glibc versions, that's where I see the need for the upgrade to a newer upstream version.
In a team as small as this, resources are finite.
I would be interested to know where others see the priorities for the zorin developers should be - for example: focus on changing to a different Desktop environment vs focussing on zorin grid?
TL;DR: IMO - Zorin is in a good place regarding desktop environment, focus somewhere else.
P.S:
I just recently tried Linux mint with cinnamon because of the glibc issue I had... That onboarding experience doesn't feel anything close to zorin IMO.
If you want to try a few things yourself with mint +cinnamon to compare to zorin:
In a multi-monitor setting: Try adding the taskbar to every monitor
Try changing Keyboard shortcuts for the menu out of the box
Try allowing SSH Access from the settings app
P.P.S:
In Mint+Cinnamon, the spinning color wheel when the computer is downloading updates feels very much MacOS-y. I don't care for it when the computer does stuff and my mouse indicator is locked to that spinning color wheel for the duration, no matter where I want to click. Certainly Windows users won't like it either...
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They got rid of the ability to use extensions, to make the OS utterly useless.
This is plain wrong, I don't know where you got this.
Apps Menu - GNOME Shell Extensions click the dropdown to see the list of gnome shell versions.
I've already downloaded it and take a quick Look in the Live Mode. For my Happiness, there are no Gnome Games! Unfortunately there doesn't seem to come Synaptic preinstalled. But a couple of other Stuff which I will have to kick out. The overall Look feels realy good - the minimalistic Gnome Look like it is. Except the Gnome Terminal. This seems to be in GTK3 I would think because of the kind of beige Window. the othere Stuff as far as I take a Look at it had the greyish white Look. I like their Cantarell Font, too.
That isn't right. You can still install Gnome Extensions. But yes: with every new Main Version of Gnome DE the Extension Developers have to make it fit to the new Version. Which isn't ideal, yes. Some kind of common ... Interface would be good.
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But this is true for every software out there. Not every api breaks every release. in fact probably very few have breaking changes each release, but then, some extensions might need to fix a thing or two.
Well ... yes and no. I wouldn't set that on the same Level like a Software that runs on an OS. Technically it wouldn't be wrong because an Extension is Software, too. But it isn't about an OS, it is about the Destop Environment.
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