So let me get this straight, they have a windows look by default, but using GNOME for whatever reason, then they give you the option to switch to something more vanilla GNOME but disable all of the gestures and workspaces, and then they advertise it like they invented gestures when they decide to stop disabling all of them
This looks beautiful, congrats to Zorin contributors!
Is it me or does most of this look like Gnome? 🤔
So basically Ubuntu-based GNOME-skin OS, advertising GNOME’s new features as their own?
Yeah, I don’t get it either. Like 95% of the stuff they promote is already out there in Fedora for a long time. It isn’t anything special to Zorin.
Not much of a progress this time.
Still waiting for zorin grid.
All the shit I hate about windows packed into a Linux environment… I guess maybe it will help Windows users switch over?
mfw when entire distros are advertising UI features of gnome that came standard on every DE like 15+ years ago, including gnome.
Seriously, Compiz is from 2006.
Also I find their Zorin OS Pro offer a bit scummy. Now the themes do look nice, but few would spend 50$ for a few themes. So they advertise having 5000$ worth of professional creative alternatives bundled. In screenshots you’ll then see Kdenlive, Blender and Inkscape. I don’t know what to think about the fact they want 50$ for bundling a few themes and free software. If they had just kept the stupid 5000$ part out I would have been fine with it, professional support can be great for people switching over from windows, but this seems a bit scummy to me.
We need fewer distros and more focus on things that matter.
you are free to not make distros
You’re right. I will start a new distro that focuses on the the things that matter.
Man, I laughed so hard at this one
I think a unified package manager/app store model that is vetted by all contributing distros would go a long way. SteamOS/Steam deck is bringing gamers to linux and that’s great. But it would be easier to bring on a lot more desktop users if there was an app store that every distro could visit. Flatpak is close, snaps however I think are too polarizing.
I use fedora silverblue. I’d like to switch to suse microos but the difference is so small that it’s probably not worth it to switch. (Just a guesstimate, silverblue has some goodies afterall with the whole image centric os)
Probably, it’s almost the same for vanillaos. Because everything is within distrobox and flatpak, I do not work with the native package manager anymore (almost, there are exceptions because of the DE).
If I would switch to microos, I, as an enduser, wouldn’t notice too much a real difference.
People should stop making new distros for what should be a post install script. But, things are fucking complicated and that’s why we need the forks and new distros.
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Thx for the elaboration. That’s what I roughly meant with “image centric os”.
Opensuse aeon encourages you to use flatpak. The first thing it does right after installation is to install apps from flathub, including firefox (unlike silverblue).
An example from the doc
For this reason, All Applications, Browsers, Codecs needed for specific apps, etc are provided by FlatPaks from FlatHub.
Especially the following
To reiterate: EVERYTHING should be done via Flatpaks or be installed in a Distrobox if a package is not available as a flatpak. Using transactional-update is strictly what you need for your host operating system to work (exotic drivers, specialized vpn services).
Usually, you do not rollback, you do not go back to an older system. On both systems, you use distrobox and flatpak. I don’t see much of a difference as an end user.
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Fedora has images which you can create yourself as an enduser which means a corporation with thousands of computers can create their own image. They don’t have to create a new distro. That’s not possible with suse but I don’t know if that’s so important since I do not administer such things. I as an enduser do not care about the underlying system, I don’t tinker with it, I rarely touch it. That’s the case for both distros. I may install a vpn or so.
If you want to tinker with your system, neither fedora nor suse are good for that, using arch is the way to go.
Why is fedora better for advanced users?
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I disagree. Each distro is a user of a thousand different open source systems. When a distro developer integrates gnome, systemd, bluez, or whatever other system they’re finding, reporting, and possibly fixing bugs that end users might miss. Other than arch users, who else is compiling these things from scratch and really digging into the documentation?
Us weird debian testing users.
Gentoo users? Void users?
They’d still be doing that.
That kinda is his point. A distro maintainer patching and distributing a thousand packages is duplicitous. Especially when the only real difference to the user is the DE. Putting those efforts upstream is a better use of resources. I develop software, and I’m not going to test a million different distros especially when the difference between Ubuntu and Zorin is a DE and some additional packages. It makes Linux users very mad, but the reality is that they are too fractured to support every distro they use equally.
Distributions nowadays are defined by their desktop bling :(
It used to be that you could just install whatever desktop you fancied on pretty much any distro.
I mean you still can
Can you install MacOS by Zorin™ on something else? I suppose there’s a source repository somewhere and you can always compile it if you really want it…
There’s a gnome extension (ArcMenu) that’s inspired by Zorin that’s simply a better and more customizable version of all of zorin’s desktop themes (and more). You can get it on any Linux
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More people should start charging for their work and actually staffing security. I like zorin just for the fact that I have expectations for items I pay for where things that are free I can’t really hold accountable.
I know that’s antiFOSS but I’m somewhere in the middle lately. I want to pay for quality but still be able to tinker with it.
A lot of free and open source products are in fact funded through grants or corpates
What do you mean? Payment isn’t anti-FOSS at all, it’s just a lot harder to make money when the source is libre.
I’m glad you think so. I remember Richard stallman banging on a bongo singing that charging for software is greed.
I just want people to have enough incentives for their time that things are safe and the workers paid properly. I wish more open source devs got paid.
That’s not exactly anti-FOSS, to my understanding, since the “free” part refers to freedom. As long as after you pay you are free to use the software as you want and get access to the source code, I think it might still count as FOSS? And then, of course, there’s the option of paid support on free (of charge) software, though I think recent events might suggest that’s not really sustainable.
