When you think of the volumes of feedback received by two developers that make all of this possible; The OS, its many additional software packages, its repositories with all the changes and maintenance, as well as maintaining this forum, covering all legal workings including multiple nations laws in relation to their products... It makes a lot of sense that some automation is necessary.
Artyom and Kyrill Zorin absolutely 100% do read and react to the feedback. And I have absolutely no idea how they manage it all. These must be two people who are highly organized with excellent focus.
How well can any one of us read through this one thread and pick out the relevant suggestions or bug reports, prioritize them and then consider or act on them without losing track or getting lost in sifting? And they do this across the entire forum.
And yet, we do not hear words: We see the implementation of that feedback, regularly. Even when the ZorinGroup needed to develop from scratch a means of making it happen.
While the ZorinGroup are not chatty, they are not absent, either. We can not only see the results in the development. Or even the occassional response they give to threads on this forum.
Some time back, I ran into some stickiness on my own development side. And I could not figure out what was wrong and searching the issue on the web was not helpful. I figured... Artyom Zorin would know. So, I sent him a PM here and asked. A short time later, he replied with a full walkthrough on how to resolve the issue which included his own developed tips that make it easier.
Zorin OS Pro includes direct installation support from the ZorinGroup. They stay very busy with replying to users and it can take some time to get their reply due to the volume of people in front of you in line. They must prioritize based on these time constraints to focus on that which needs a directed response, rather than being noted to fix in the code without the need for a direct reply.
I can assure all readers in full confidence that their feedback of all kinds is in good hands.
? I don't have any network issues now or previously running virt-manager. What made you think I was having network issues? All VMs I have ever run in virt-manager on any distro I have never had a network issue. Could never do that in VirtualBox even if you changed the settings to allow that. (Corrected this post - was able to drag a file from Zorin 16.3 /home partition to /home partition of VM!)
I don't know if it is because I am now on my second failing hard drive, but booting from cold, when it gets to the logo of ZORIN flying in, couple of seconds after screen goes blank, then the same occurrence happens again, i.e., ZORIN flies in again, then slow hard drive activity a few seconds after needing me to reboot, go into recovery mode. I then usually start network, then drop to root terminal prompt and check for updates. None this a.m., then exit out then select first menu item of resume booting, and it boots into the Beta. Would be nice to know other people have got a spare drive and a hot swap bay for drives like me to test Beta on Bare Metal.
I have Beta installed as a dual boot on a machine that also has LM23.2 on it. Zorin is the default OS so it boots up automatically as the first choice on the Grub menu. It seems to be booting up normally. And so far everything seems to be working fine with the exception of the software store being very slow to populate the page after you select a catagory of software you want to look at. Howeve the search function of the software store seems to work fairly quickly. I have downloaded and installed Betterbird and Ungoogled Chromium and a couple of games and all have worked fine. I know at least one other person has reported problems getting downloaded software to work but I haven't seen that. I have also noticed that since I have done a real install I no longer am getting the popping noises when using my mouse that I was getting when running live off the thumbdrive.
As far as I know, there's very little Rust being used in any GNU/Linux distribution, only few bits here and there. The only major project that I know of that is written in Rust, in the context of Linux for desktop, is the upcoming desktop environment by System76.
The .deb package for gnome-shell-extension-manager installed by Software is 0.3.0. This version is for Gnome Shell 42, and doesn't work properly in Gnome Shell 43. Specifically, the "Browse" function results do not have the "load more results" button and you may not see a match.
The best option for users is to install the Flatpak version which works correctly.
I don't know if this is the appropriate topic, but as a Zorin Lite user, I was wondering if a useful suggestion for the Zorin Group would be to increase the size of the xfce calendar a little, as the xfce default is quite small. I know there are tutorials for this, but they require command line, something new users want away from.
I did move this post to the Zorin OS 17 Beta feedback thread as a means of ensuring the @staff can review this suggestion in regards to the upcoming Zorin OS 17 Lite edition of Zorin OS.
First bug I got so far in the new gnome software store: garbage text in the permissions box. Not a huge problem, since the pop-up with the details that shows up after clicking on it does seem to display all the text fine
Speaking of the software store, this new version feels much smoother and faster to load and way more reliable than the one on Z16. If it stays as stable as it has been to me for the final release, this alone will reduce the amount of help requests and bug reports compared to Z16 by half
Oh, and if you are running the Z17 beta and don't like snaps, watch out, as an update I installed this morning brought the snaps as a dependency (but can be removed after it gets installed). The update seemed to only mention gnome software, some shell extensions, software's flatpak support and some libraries. Didn't see snapd mentioned in the list of packages to install/update until it appeared during the update process (too late to cancel it) and I found that kinda odd
Graphical issues with Zorin Appearance. The Beta 'Take a screenshot' application does not have a timer, so I have installed Shutter. I am just in the middle of going through Zorin Appearance for the unofficial manual for Zorin 17 Beta when I discovered some glitches. The glitches can be pinned down to the Compiz elements (having Spatial desktop active, plus cube etc.) This morning whilst looking at Layouts in Zorin Appearance I got this screenshot:
The window behind Zorin Appearance appears to be an amalgam of different applications open at the time. A similar thing happened whilst taking a screenshot of the Pantheonesque Layout with the Applications Grid (not taken a screenshot of that as it was just garbled - to take a stable image I had to turn off all animations.
The last Layout I found unworkable, as it is supposed to be a Gnome layout. The Dash at the bottom of screen ony appears if the Activities Overview
button is selected and the only menu option is to select the Grid that appears on the Dash to view the Grid Menu which is going back to the Pantheon style desktop.
Basically, (personally) I find this layout unworkable and confusing, but each to their own! It appears to inherit the previouis layout in a strange way.
Having checked what is running it is using proprietary nvidia driver. In earlier versions of Zorin, the graphics driver could be chosen separately from restricted codecs - you don't get the option to not select proprietary drivers or able to select restricted extras (codecs) separately like in earlier versions - that is the only reason proprietary drivers got installed. Have reverted to Nouveau drivers, still to test. Notice that the 'Cube' software is getting an update today in Updates.
Update: Using Nouveau resolved the multiple screen tearing! Oh nvidia, how I hate thee now!
This is what happens when choosing the 'Gnome' Desktop. Only Activities button showing (No menus like 'Applications', 'System' menu headers like in traditional Gnome and you sort of get a repeat of the Bottom left DE with the Grid of Applications to the right of the Dash - certainly not a Desktop I could work with, period! Also when this Layout is chosen, only the close button is seen on anhy open Apps - no Minimise or Maximise buttons - they disappear.
Here are some answers to our questions as supplied by the ZorinGroup.
In regards to Firefox as a Flatpak, I will crosslink here:
In regards to Snapd not being available right away:
Has Snapd been eliminated in Zorin OS 17?
We're still shipping Snapd in Zorin OS 17. In the Beta we removed the Snap GNOME Software plugin as we found that it was causing performance issues, especially with search. During Beta testing we have found that GNOME Software 42.4 still has significant performance issues for many users, although it is definitely better than previous versions.
To resolve these issues, we recently tested and backported GNOME Software 45.2 which is the latest release that came out around 2 weeks ago. We have also backported a newer version of libadwaita (and patched it to support 3rd party themes) as it was a dependency for the new GNOME Software.
The new GNOME Software is significantly faster and we have found that the Snap plugin no longer noticeably affects performance so we are enabling it again to expand the default app selection.
I think it is very helpful to note in the above that subtle reminder that the Zorin OS 17 Beta is a Beta testing version. Thanks to the feedback received, further developments and testing; the Final Release of Zorin OS 17 may hold a more familiar look.
Speaking of the "Wow" factor; it appears we have one. In Zorin OS 17, users will be in control of and able to set their preferred application format in the Software Store.
As many of us have noted in using other distros, we can feel a bit discouraged when a software install is redirected to a format we did not wish for. Or that the format is selected for you.
With Zorin OS 17, you can re-take control over this.
The summary contains the background information which users can read. Below the summary is the Meat of the Issue that you can jump right to.
Summary
We don't explicitly prioritize one packaging format over another. Instead we want to provide our users with the widest and latest selection of apps available. One of the main reasons why we include containerized formats like Flatpak and Snap is that they provide the latest versions of apps which many users have come to expect. As APT packaging tends to provide only one version of a dependency, it's often not possible to backport the latest version of an app without breaking lots of other software in the repositories. This is also why we are quite selective with which software we backport in order to avoid system breakages. We usually only backport software if it provides significant advantages (such as performance improvements or major features) with minimal to no risk of breakages.
For example we backported GNOME Shell 43 as it had significant performance and feature improvements but only required a small number of new dependencies to be backported. Subsequent versions of GNOME Shell did not have any major advantages but required many additional dependencies that could have resulted in breakages and would have created a significant maintenance overhead.
As a result of the difficulty in backporting APT packages, many users complain about outdated APT packages for their favorite apps.
In Zorin OS we give users who want the latest versions of software the option to install it using containerized formats. Users who prefer the familiarity of APT packages will continue to have the option to do so. The preferred source can be selected in the dropdown on the app's listing page in GNOME Software.
BTW it's now possible to set the default package source priority in the new Software store for all app listings, so you can set APT/DEB to be preferred over Flatpak and Snap if that's what you wish to behavior to be. Simply enter this Terminal command, changing the order in the array value as you please: gsettings set org.gnome.software packaging-format-preference "['deb', 'flatpak:flathub', 'flatpak', 'snap']"
Has anyone been able to install extensions through the Extension Manager? I also tried through Epiphany browser, but doesn't seem to do anything either way. Although I only tested with this one extension:
