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.
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 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.
Mint was the other distro I looked at actually. Just doing some cursory reading I like the additional emphasis Zorin placed on privacy.
*rdit - Not saying that Mint doesn't in this case. Sorry i see it may have sounded that way from how I worded it.
You're definitely valid for being concerned about privacy, but I think much more of privacy is how you configure your system and less how it ships, especially when it's all Linux under the hood anyways. Additionally, privacy features aren't much good when they're bundled, set to defaults, and never fully configured - it's both a great learning opportunity and provides even better security to set up things like browser extensions, a firewall, tor, etc. yourself so you can know their ins and outs than simply having them installed by default and never touching them.
Of course the privacy difference between Windows and Linux is so night and day that that leap on its own might be everything you're looking for and then some, but Linux is always what you make it, so you're not giving up much when picking one or the other! The only big things you're locking into is a community and a package manager/repository, and Mint is definitely top notch in those regards, so it'd be hard to do better.
Something that hasn't quite been touched upon but might be important to note is that both Zorin and Linux Mint run 'old' kernels (almost two years old in fact). While this does not necessarily have to affect you, there's a considerable chance that you might not reap the benefit from improved performance and other good stuff that would be found on a newer kernel.
Generally speaking, you should be fine regardless. However, if you intend to primarily engage in high-fidelity gaming, then I'd argue it's at least worth benchmarking your performances on Zorin and/or Linux Mint and compare that to a Fedora(-based distro; like Bazzite or Nobara) or an openSUSE Tumbleweed (or perhaps even an Arch(-based distro) if you're feeling brave). If the differences are negligible, then you shouldn't let this be a factor to take into consideration. But if it isn't, then you might want to (at least) consider switching over to a distro with a newer kernel (eventually).
Finally, the 'old' kernel is -in a sense- one of the reasons why both Zorin and Linux Mint are even popularized for newer users. But, that's something I won't be able to go over in this comment for the sake of brevity.
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.
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
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!
