When I decided to go to Linux. It was a long time coming. When I saw Zorin and how it looked. I said this was it. But it was Linux. I remembered when my brother had Red Hat. Before it became more for enterprise. This was many decades ago. I got fed up with Microsoft/Windows. I said it was time to go. Now the boot drive that I had gave me much trouble. I prepared for weeks watching videos. When I went to install. It didn't go as planned. Lets just say I had a nervous breakdown. And my brother had to come out to help. After it got installed and no more Microsoft/Windows as my OS. I saw how this looked. This is nice. It took me a few days to learn. After being with Windows for 30 years. It does take time. But after a while I kept saying to myself "this is how a computer should work, wow." I always fought windows. And I didn't like a lot about Windows 10 even hated Windows 11. Like most who said enough is enough. A course there are problems that arise. Mine was sound that was fixed by getting new speakers with Linux support. The other was most would know my scanner issue. That has been solved. As I have been referring to as my "New Linux Family". I have Dell. I like Dell because you can customize most computers. I do see that on the higher end Dell offers Linux Distros. But not Zorin. I wish computer hardware companies made it better for Linux users to use their products. Since people are leaving Microsoft in droves. And I wish the computer companies started thinking. To offer Linux on new computers different distros. Since Microsoft is becoming worse. I would prefer Zorin OS as an option. Going to Zorin from Microsoft would be the simple way for a high percentage of people. Since for a few decades Microsoft have controlled the people. Thank You Zorin for being there for all of us who left Microsoft/Windows. As far as my concern Microsoft could fade into dust. Now that the people have Zorin OS. Maybe someday when you buy a new computer Zorin would be the OS on the system and not Windows.
Well it is good that you are having a good time with GNU/Linux. Whilst I would agree with most of what you have said, unfortunately there are occasions when some people are in a specific profession that relies on Proprietary software and there is nothing of the same calibre in the open source world.
I have just lost a client who has had to go back to Windows because being someone who deals with Planning, their GNU/Linux experience was unable to cope with planning documents.
I was a fervent advocate for Zorin after I joined at version 4. Version 5 is still probably my favourite release, but sadly, nothing lasts forever or stays still long enough to be appreciated.
The issue facing future releases of Zorin are many, principally the issues facing Zorin are:
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The Gnome project. As @Aravisian has stated elsewhere they have taken on an attitude potentially worse than Microsoft, and that is saying something. They believe Developers and Users of Gnome should only do things how they say they should be done. (This reminds me of the time I undertook MS Office Professional Exams at work. You had to carry out MS method of three steps whereas in real life you would only take two steps, but doing that in the online exam would result in failure. Needless to say unfortunately I only passed on Word, Excel and PowerPoint - MS Access was beyond my grasp [thankfully!])
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Canonical (Ubuntu) on which ZorinOS is based on. Major changes are happening with the introduction of Rust and a whole load of other changes that is going to add more complications down the line. One of the biggest issues that I have noticed of late is that forum members have installed an 'APT' package only to find somewhere down the line, Canonical have forcefully changed the software to a 'snap' package. 'snap' is Canonical's response to Red Hat force-feeding 'flatpak' to be adopted by other distributions (even though they were not behind 'flatpak' they quickly adopted it and tried making it the 'de facto' software packaging system to replace 'outdated' APT and prevent the need for developers having to write software in different formats for different packaging systems - .rpm (RedHat Package Management), .deb (Debian Package Management).
What 'snap' and 'flatpak' do is they make programs work in isolation from the system, in a similar way to what App Images do, they are standalone elements that have to be updated separately from the system and because of this they introduce bloatware.
Sadly it appears that team Zorin appear to be pushing 'flatpak' more and more as evidenced in the Software store 'APT' has been re-labeled Zorin-APT, so alphabetically it becomes the last option instead of the first, flatpak followed by snap being the first two available options, alphabetically.
This is one area where Q4OS differs in that flatpak is a post-install option, not part of it, for those who want it.
For me personally I now limit myself to distributions that do not come encumbered with 'systemd' (with the exception of Linux Mint Debian Edition and Q4OS) or PulseAudio. I even still prefer ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) over PipeWire that has superseded (but not entirely replaced) PulseAudio, another Red Hat imposition, just like systemd.