Calling Zorin 17 an upgrade seems to be deceptive. After paying the $48 I upgraded from 16 Pro last night to 17 Pro expecting to see two things:
- The performance boost promised by the developers.
- At least some visual indication of an upgrade by virtue of improvements to the user-interface.
Here is what I observed following a flawless transition:
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Virtually no change in performance: a) My 12-year-old Gateway dual core machine on boot is unavailable for a full three (3) minutes while the start-up processes hammers the two cores to 100%. It seems about a minute longer than before, but that could have been due to the installation being configured for the first time.
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Almost worse, the "upgrade" did nothing to manage Chrome's absolute abuse of system resources, for example, opening up to eight (8) instances of 'crash-pad-handler', which adds another 3-4 minutes of wait time until the machine is available for use.
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Not a single change to the U.I. is observed, other than maybe the window labels appear to have a little higher resolution. In other words, it's the same product as its predecessor - an update, not a upgrade.
Overall Zorin, in my opinion, is the best of the Linux distros, and I'm happy to continue supporting it. But I'm disappointed in the performance promise not being delivered. Maybe with 18, fellas?
Many of the improvements are "under the hood".
Ubuntu made many changes to the OS, which were included in Zorin 17, which then were tweaked and other improvements added by the Zorin's.
As they choose to go with gnome 43, the UI didn't change much. There are additions and improvements to the taskbar as well as the app menu and many other things that you don't notice because they are hidden in some capacity, until you need them.
Putting a new paint job, carberator and air filter on a car will give you a little more power and responsiveness, as well as asthetics, but it's not like going from a four cylinder to an eight cylinder engine. Nothing will improve a dual/quad core to make it respond like today's hex and octa cores. There is no software that will be so efficient on processor and ram to allow it to seem like a newer computer... it's still limited by the hardware.
You want significant improvements, upgrade what you can (ram, cpu, gpu, hard drive, network card). If they are already maxed in that motherboard, find one that will fit that computer housing, though that means upgrading the power supply too.
If you aren't happy with the performance, you may have to come to the realization that newer hardware is necessary in order to reduce the time spent booting and loading... it's just how it is.
Sure there are performance improvements, but they are limited and focused based on hardware.
Is carburettor spelt differently over the pond? Whilst 17 offers lower demands on RAM requirements, a 12 year old machine is going to struggle with a heavy DE. You might get a better performance with xfce which Zorin Lite uses which is not yer available but would expect its release in the next few weeks. If you have paid for the Pro version you also get the Lite version too, it just isn't out yet. I have a machine my Good lady uses from 2006, an MSI motherboard maxed out at 2 Gb RAM, an AMD Athlon 64 single processor and an EVGA 256 Mb 8x AGP (nVidia based) graphics card, currently running MX-Linux 21.2 xfce 'Wildflower'.
Forgive my spelling, I'm tired, fighting an infection and wanted to reply before bed.
Auto correct didn't catch it either... funny.
Sorry to hear you are under the weather friend. Get well soon!
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Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Agree, my expectations may be too high, although my machine exceeds the advertised minimum specs for Zorin 17, including an Intel SSD and 4GB RAM. It was my late wife's computer, so it has sentimental value to me. Even with the slow boot up it exceeds the performance of the previous Windows versions (7 and then 10). I'll carry on. Thanks again.
Is using Zorin OS Lite an option for it?