I recently gave ZorinOS a try to see how good it would work for my friends who have been using Windows, and I found it to be amazing but I think a beginner would have some issues without someone helping to maintain their system:
- The ZorinOS appstore installs flatpaks over native applications. This caused me to run into the issue of Lutris not being able to recognize steam, and not being able to upload skins to Minecraft. These are easy issues for someone knowledgeable about Linux to fix by either going to the app store and manually selecting the option for a native app, or using Flatseal to fix permissions. But for a normal person these issues are very hard to fix (searching "Lutris not showing steam" and "Minecraft on linux not letting me upload skins" on google does not give results that fix the issue on the front page.)
- I find the current options and defaults for updating not aggressive enough. Most normal people, do not go out of their way to update the system, even when receiving polite prompts asking them to do so. Harder to ignore prompts when turning the computer off / restarting, as well as automatically downloading updates and restarting the computer if the user is not active and has no applications open that object to being closed would be nice.
- When sleep is enabled, the system will fall asleep even while being used.
- No way (that I can find) to set a custom accent color.