Recently I am considering more and more moving my primary pc to a Linux distro. Somewhat for privacy issues but also to have more control over my system and to reduce the amound of advertising that windows keeps cramming in my face. Specifically I’m looking at Zorin. I was wondering what thoughs people here had on it.
I predominantly use my pc for gaming with friends. Almost entirely through Steam and we use discord to communicate. I’m mostly just curious if anyone here has had much experience with Zorin and whay they thought of it as a daily driver for gaming.
While both Mint and Zorin are good “beginner” distros, they might not be the best choice for gaming. Since your primary use seems to be gaming and you’re on an nvidia GPU, you may also want to have a look at distros, that make it easier to set them up for that. So apart from Pop_OS you could also look at Nobara Linux or Bazzite. Not to confuse you with even more options, but it’s good to know what’s out there and try some stuff out to see what works.
There are definitely a of of options, but I think thats a good thing in this case. I’ve seen quite a few people mention Pop_OS. I’m leaning towards giving that a shot and seeing how I like it. Thank you for the input :).
I’m really excited about where Pop! is going, and I plan to make it my next os. I’ve been using Ubuntu for a while now.
Well it’s the one I’m testing. Spun up a vm just to take a look. Still trying to wrap my head around some stuff but overall I like it. It seems mostly intuitive and the ui is easy on the eyes.
Your experience with Linux actually depends more on the desktop environment than the distro. The big 4 are called gnome, kde, cinnamon and xfce.
For users looking to migrate from windows, I always recommend kde. It’s slick, full-featured, comes with a good catalog of apps and (imho) is the most windows-like experience. Kde is going to function mostly the same regardless of the distro you pick.
I’m a long time slackware user. Slackware ships with kde by default but will have a much steeper learning curve than previously mentioned distros. But if you really want to learn Linux computing then maybe give it a try.
Mostly. Even KDE has some helper apps and set up that is not always included. For instance: A default EndevourOS install will not have SMB set up. Other distros may or may not. A new user might expect Network discovery to be configured for them to at least see what else is on the network. KDE has a network tab available but without the distro configuring it, it wont do anything. That is just one example.
I started out with zorin, i love it. I gamed on it a fair bit, it does help you run wine things by installing wine if you try to run anything windows so it might be good if you just switched. But I was looking for something minimal so I’m on KDE Neon now. I use bottles to run games and works amazing too.
I use bottles to run games and works amazing too.
Am I dullard for just using Lutris? Like literally any time I want to install a program or game I will use Lutris’ GUI to select the installer, select a prefix directory, and so on. Once it’s done installing, then I switch the target EXE to the actual program I want. It isn’t exactly convenient but it has been reliable. So I haven’t tried any other approach.
As long as it works. I still go back to “play on Linux” once in a while to look back on the not so minimal GUI, has a certain charm to it.
I don’t have much to add here, since I mostly agree with the others.
I started with Zorin too (a few years ago) and back then it was great. It was almost the same as Mint, but looked more modern.
Nowadays, I would recommend Mint more than Zorin. Zorin isn’t bad, but isn’t maintained as much anymore.
There were lots of upgrades (performance, looks, functionality) in the underlying system (kernel, UI, etc.) which Zorin didn’t recieve. But it still isn’t a BAD choice, but there are better ones.
Mint is an example of that. It’s also very conservative (-> stable), but heavily maintained and improved. It isn’t a gaming distro, but every distro is suited for gaming anyway.
Use that for a while and see what you dislike.
Then switch to something like Fedora (or Nobara), Pop!OS, or Bazzite. The latter is definitely for more advanced users, since it’s a very new concept and not as spread. It’s more similar to SteamOS.
Don’t base your choice by “it’s a gaming distro”. That doesn’t matter much. You can install those tweaks pretty easily on everything else.
I have a… philosophical issue with Zorin. It is based on Ubuntu, which is fine, but then they charge for “Zorin Pro” which gives you access to different preconfigured desktop layouts that are provided using FOSS software. They’re doing nothing wrong from a licensing perspective or anything, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
I would say Linux Mint or even just Ubuntu are better recommendations for a solid beginner distro.
My elderly mum and dad use Zorin and they have no issues. But their needs are simple, and they mainly need a simple, easy to use, and stable system. I wouldn’t recommend Zorin if you’re a gamer though, since it’s not really optimised for gaming, and it has outdated packages. Software in the Linux world moves really fast, so as a gamer you’d ideally want to always be on the latest graphic driver stack, latest Wine/Proton, latest kernel etc in order to get better compatibility with games and better performance. Zorin and most Ubuntu-based distros like Mint and Pop_OS generally lag behind on several key packages, which may not be ideal for a gamer.
If you want a daily-driver for gaming, I’d recommend checking out Nobara (based on Fedora), or Bazzite (based on Fedora uBlue). Both these distros come with all the drivers, codecs and optimized versions of Steam, to make gaming easier. Nobara has an added advantage of an optimized versions of the kernel, Proton, Discord and a few other apps, whereas Bazzite has the added advantage of atomic updates and an immutable filesystem, which increases stability and makes it easy to rollback an uodate, plus it can behave like SteamOS and boot directly into gamemode, which is great if you want to get a console-like experience.
I would say Nobara should be a good starting point. Once you’re a bit more familiar with Linux, you could check out Bazzite, because internally it works quite differently compared to traditional desktop operating systems.
Recommendations are only recommendations. Try the distros out yourself in a VM like VMware, configure it, spend some time in them, and see which you like the most. It should only take a few hours
nothing wrong with Zorin. If you game on steam and want a very windows like experience it will work. It was my running up when I went into Linux. The only reason I chose mint was mint had a bigger subreddit and I knew I would go there or tech support.
You might want to know about discord updates, if the maintainers of the distribution don’t update discord as fast as the discord developper, it will fail to launch when major update happen since those don’t go through the internal updater of the client, and discord only provide a .deb package, which you can install with a simple double click on debian based distribution (ubuntu, mint, mx, zorin etc), and a generic linux exectuable, which can be launched in any distributions but won’t be automatically integrated in your application menus
Try tweaking this, courtesy of the slackbuild page for discord:
If you’d like Discord to continue working after an upstream update is released, but is not yet available on SBo, add the following to your user’s ~/.config/discord/settings.json file:
“SKIP_HOST_UPDATE”: true
Thats super helpful, thank you!
Thank the maintainer of that slackbuild who probably got tired of people bugging him to update the script every time a new release came out and threw up that helpful note!
