Summary: Zorin 18 fails to boot after a "Full Installation," reporting a GDM service failure due to the installer consuming nearly 40GB of disk space.
Hardware: Dell XPS 13 9310 (Intel Iris Xe Graphics) Support Status: Ticket opened and currently pending developer review. (last contact 1/5/26)
The Issue: While Zorin OS runs fine in "Try" mode from a USB, a Full Installation results in 37.07 GiB of used space on a fresh partition. This leaves insufficient disk space for the system to initialize, resulting in a black screen and a reported gdm.service failure.
Workaround Found: Performing a Minimal Installation (offline, no third-party software/updates) results in a healthy 8.76 GiB usage and a fully functional system.
Technical Observation: The evidence suggests to me that the "Full" installation process is either stuck in a loop, incorrectly cloning data, or generating massive error logs (perhaps involving Intel Iris Xe firmware/drivers) during the final stages. No matter how big I made the partition, even 100GB, the Zorin Installer filled it.
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Hi and welcome.
I was a bit concerned to see that you have not heard anything from Team Zorin since 01.05.26.
I am curious to know what method you used to install Zorin. (What USB software did you use?)
Howdy. Just today in fact (1/20/26) Zorin got back to me and said "We've been researching this issue and have been able to reproduce it under certain conditions. We've added the resolution to this edge case as a task on our development roadmap. In the meantime, we've updated our System Requirements page to reflect the disk storage requirements for the latest .isos of Zorin OS 18 Pro: System Requirements - Zorin Help".
As for installation I believe I used balenaEtcher to create a bootable installation drive for the Zorin OS ISO (which you can find at Install Zorin OS - Zorin Help). Then I ran Zorin in Try mode which allowed me to bring up GParted to create the partition for a permanent Zorin install. As I was originally a Windows user (all my life) I used Easeus Partition Master to prep the ground on the Windows side, for example moving all of my documents and other data to a D:
Hope this answers your question.
Indeed it does and thanks for responding. If you search this forum you will find lots of negatives regarding Zorin's choice of Balena Etcher. It causes more problems with installs than any other. Balena Etcher is only of use to owners of old Macs.
You will find a lot of support for Rufus from Windows users on here.
My personal preference is for Ventoy as it includes MOK enrolment when installing to an EFI enabled BIOS and is the simplest to use. I have used Ventoy for Zorin 17 and 18 Core, Linix Mint Debian Edition 7, Q4OS, MX-Linux, Hiren's Boot CD without any issues. In addition to Ventoy there are many distributions that come with their own USB thumb drive creation tools. Zorin is one that doesn't.
Personally I no longer use Zorin OS as a daily driver. I'm retired now (70 years old) but tring to get my business establishe in offering alternatives to that other OS that look like more recent iterations that Q4OS and PCLOS Debian have to offer. With Gnome Desktop Environment which Zorin uses to produce Zorin having a key component, mutter, being dropped by Gnome DE I won't be producing an Unofficial Manual for Zorin 19 Core (Who knows, I might not be here iif and when 19 gets released.
I hope your issue finally gets resolved.
On a separate note it would be useful if Team Zorin updated their machine specifications for Core too.
Here we have another example where GNU/Linux has lost it's way where it's main tenet was to breathe life into old machines instead of creating e-waste.
I was pleasantly surprised that I could get Q4OS Plasma working on a machine I built from 2006 but it does lag a lot. It may need to be replaced with Q4OS Trinity DE (Desktop Environment).