NEW UPDATES! Zorin OS 17 vs Mint | Which is better for new users?

so let me ask you a question if you were going to recommend a Linux distribution for a brand new user somebody who is looking to get out of Windows or Mac OS and you had to present them with one option to try on their laptop or their desktop at home for the very first time what would you pick chances are most of us would probably recommend something like either Linux Mint or zoron Os as a place to start this is the start for many people's Linux Journeys and if you are one of those people then stick around because this video might be helpful for you now if you're someone like myself who's been running Linux for a long time there's still something that I have to appreciate from projects like this fulls transparency I still use Linux Mint as you can see here as the system that I run my my channel from I love Linux Mint it's a great project so what I'm going to aim to do today is two things first of all I'm going to give you my thoughts on the final version of zaros s 17 now I'm using the pro version because the team at zor are kind enough to provide a copy for press purposes um but at the same time the core version much of what I'm going to say applies to the core version that is available for free from zor's website as the time of this video going live uh but I'm also going to secondly compare it a little bit and try to score it a little bit against Linux Mint because I think as a beginner friendly distribution that helps ease the transition over from Mac OS or Windows into the Linux World both of these are prime examples of how to do that really well so let's jump in and we'll have a look [Music] now the key question that we have to answer today is which one does it better and i' would love to be able to answer this definitively we'll see where it lands I have my suspicions but let's talk it through okay so first of all the installation process for both of these distributions is going to be basically identical they both use the same uh ubiquity installer they are both based on auntu 2204 which is worth mentioning because auntu 2204 is well over 18 months old at this point and the new LTS release is just around the corner now when it comes to the life cycles of these distributions Zoran os6 came out uh after the release of auntu 20.04 and it had three kind of service pack updates to try and keep it more up toate in terms of the kernel and the graphics drivers that were available on the other hand mint develops their release relatively In Cadence with the LTS release so while RAR os7 is coming out out a little over 18 months since the auntu 2204 LTS mint came out with their mint 21 release pretty shortly after the release of aun 2 so this means that development wise Linux Mint is further down the road than Zoran is generally speaking however as you may have watched in my Zoran OS 17 First Impressions video there's a bit more going on than just that so all I'm going to say is that the installation process and the compatibility that you get from the kernel from drivers and from Hardware are all pretty similar between these two when it comes to the users's first impressions that's when things diverge a little bit so what I'm going to say is that the first impression that you get with zor West is that it is far more uh polished and modern I use that Loosely uh than its mint counterpart I mean just have a look at the difference here between the way this desktop looks versus the way that the desktop looks even though I've dressed it up a little bit on Linux Mint right so there's the menu the quick actions the uh cascading menus out to the side uh the toolbar the system tray quick launch icons on the taskbar all of that looks fairly standard when you open up things like the file browser you get a little bit more uh granular detail with symbolic icons and that kind of thing the density of the overall interface is a little bit tighter when you go on zorin you're going to notice that uh the symbolic icons everything is a little bit more spaced out there is a uh there's a lot more white space and padding around things a lot smoother rounded edges uh all of that kind of thing now most of that is due to zorin leaning more heavily on The Gnome desktop underneath so while Zoran OS uses the gnome shell uh 40 series from auntu uh it does do a lot of work to customize it and make it its own it's called it a spatial desktop and I mean you and I like Mark speak as much as the next guy but in terms of being able to describe how this desktop works it's very similar to what gome does the difference is is that if you enable certain settings in the uh Zoran appearance app and you go down to the interface if you want to uh or if you go down to the effects rather if you want to enable the desktop Cube and have a uh a more obvious sort of distinction between some of your uh windows and you want to have a bit of a cube layout depending on how many virtual desktops you have then you can do that and uh and it's quite a smooth fluid process uh it also because of the fact this distribution uh defaults to the whin display server you get a really nice fluid animation uh if you're on decent enough Hardware uh one toone gesture tracking with the trackpad is here on Zarin compared to on Linux Mint where the gestures are registered uh on xorg and it's basically just through a keyboard binding to that particular gesture swipe so it's not quite one to one um but it's still nice to have both of these having gestures out of the box it's something that Mac OS uses especially and windows users I'm finding more recent um versions of Windows are actually pretty friendly when it comes to gestures so having those on board is nice however I would say that overall the first impression that you get from using a distribution like zaros S7 the overall U UI and ux is more polished now the trade-off here comes with a lack of power features and those that want to drill in and use uh their computer you know with a fair bit of um efficiency might find the the the padding and the extra rounded edges and all that kind of stuff a little bit Superfluous and that's fair enough so while the installation category is going to be a tie the first impressions category is going to go to zorin now for the rest of this video I'm actually going to flick off the default uh theming cuz in my opinion the default theming in the light mode is too bright uh especially in a dark environment this is blinding what I like to do is go to the dark mode and switch it to the sort of this gray graphite um accent color change the background to something that's also relatively dark and you have a pretty Suave desktop in my humble opinion all right so let's talk about then uh apart from the uh the overall user interface environment what else is going on here because of the fact these two are based on the same auntu base it can feel a little bit redundant to talk about performance however I would honestly put forward that the performance that I'm seeing on Zoros S7 both in the core and in the pro version are remarkable for what it is bear in mind that this is a fully-fledged uh full fat distribution uh the pro version weighs in at 6 something gigs for the size of the iso because of all the pre-installed software that comes with it the core version is a little lighter I think it's like 3 something gig but nevertheless these are heavy distributions and yet at a cold boot the amount of times that I've actually managed to boot up at uh less than 1 gab of ram being used is pretty remarkable uh on most versions of mod of modern auntu and even Linux Mint I'm lucky if I can get a cold boot under like 1 and a half half gigs or 1 Point around 1.2 is what is what I would uh is what I would average on a good day uh whereas for some reason zarin's been able to uh optimize their OS to the point where it will usually launch in my experience with around 110 to 120ish tasks running in the background or processors and around uh around 9 and something Megs of ram so uh the release notes for Zar actually make a point of saying that they've tried to get the system requirements under 2 GB of RAM as a requirement which for the kind of modern desktop that we're running with here uh is pretty remarkable and the overall responsiveness of this of this drro has also been pretty noticeable uh and when you take into account some of the improvements that have been made with some of the stuff that I mentioned in my last video uh about the um for example the search to launch so if you want to uh you know quickly access a particular system settings or something like that you can do so straight through the menu here like you can on Windows uh it leads to an overall really Snappy experience now Linux Mint is no slouch either and I would say that because of the fact mint s on the side of uh sort of Spartan functionality as opposed to flash and polish uh it means that you're going to have a pretty responsive experience on both of these what I would say though is that if you like a desktop that is both responsive but also feels fun to use like fluid and and um cool animations and that kind of stuff without taxing your system uh Zarin is looking really good at this point okay so right now just to recap where we've been the installation is a bit of a tie First Impressions go to zorin the desktop environment overall is going to depend on who you are for me personally I'm going to give the desktop environment score to Linux Mint because at the end of the day the environment in my experience is better suited to customization and efficiency that's what matters to me but for many people the uh the fluidity the friendliness and the Polish that is in the gnome based Zoran desktop is going to be more preferable while I don't have time to go into gaming performance on any great detail a because I'm not a huge gamer and B because of the fact that I just don't have the system set up for that uh yet what I would say is that the gaming performance on zoron OS is in my experience being slightly better there's something about what Zarin is doing on the back end with their driver management that is very impressive to me I don't know and again we're not talking factors of magnitude here we're just saying that they are doing something with uh the how they package their drivers and how they integrate in with the kernel and the rest of it that uh seems to be a little more optimized than what Linux Mint is now at the end of the day neither of these distributions are built from the ground up for gaming um but it is just worth mentioning I think Z has a slight performance Advantage just at least in my own very superficial testing now when it comes to app selection and app installation I'm going to have to give the points here to uh to zoren in the app installation Market purely for the reason that somehow they've managed to have a really polished gnome software Center based on the very latest version of gnome software it's from 45.2 and they've managed to integrate the backends for flat pack Snap app image and Debs and they have support that is readily available for Windows applications now what this means is that no matter what package you throw at this distribution it can handle it and the other nice thing about it is due to how old the Z OS base is having upto-date software is incredibly important so the fact that all of these updates get managed through the one software manager and I would say this one looks and feels a lot nicer to use than the one that comes on mint leads to this being very compelling for brand new users again somebody that wants a little more granular detail is going to appreciate the extra I guess customization and features that come with Linux mints software manager and with Linux mints update manager but the tools that zaran uses are really consumer friendly it's very hard to get this kind of stuff wrong the only point that I would knock it for is the fact that mint has a built-in system snapshot tool that prevents anything from going tragically wrong if an update did bulk your system you could roll back uh that functionality is not here in zoren that I'm aware of but when it comes to built-in Windows app support again this is always going to be a bit of a testy subject but I've downloaded the Epic installer for running fortnite or something like that if you double click on a MSI file or a commonly installed XE file from the internet if you a new user and you're wanting to download and install a piece of software what I like about Zarin is is that it actually gives a recommendation here saying that the heroic games launcher can be installed from software and that it's an alternative to the epic game store and then it says that the Epic installer is an unknown Windows app you're going to need to download an extra support layer in order to install this and it may not be fully compatible so then the highlighted option is to install the alternative this sort of thing is gold for a new user and so when you come into the uh when you click on that link it takes you straight to the software store and you can download and install the heroic games launcher which functionally does what the epic games launcher does uh that kind of Polish is really really underrated in a project like zoron because at the end of the day we all want to find alternatives to the software that we want most so common stuff like Adobe or uh you know Photoshop Microsoft Office all those sort of things will point to the Alternatives in the software store uh which again I think gives software management a bit of a leg up over mints decently functional but overall fairly aged looking software manager the only knock I would say is that we don't have readily accessible app ratings uh on the gnome software but that's neither here or there in terms of a new user again the amount of packaging that zorin does in the background for things like uh proton for lutus for Windows compatibility in general is more polished and curated than what you're going to find on mint so the app in app selection and integration I'm definitely going to have to hand to zoren uh but when it comes to integrating with your Hardware uh things like integrating with a smartphone or um being able to sync up your online accounts and your digital life in general um both of these are fairly suitable in that they both use the same backend tools to get you connected to the uh to either your phone or to your online accounts so uh on zorin these tools are built in so you have the online accounts built into gnome that you can access uh and then that will connect in your email and calendar to the evolution uh email client that's built in here on mint you get the Thunderbird email Suite which you have to set up separately from The Gnome settings uh but when it comes to smartphones you have zorin connect for zorin OS which is basically just a branded version of uh GS connect or KD connect and that will synchronize with your smartphone quite nicely they even give some recommendations for how you can do that with uh with iOS now that KD connect is available on iOS um so you can actually use zoron connect with an iPhone if you so desire uh that kind of stuff doesn't come out of the box on mint but you can definitely install it relatively easily so again it's a bit of a draw here in my opinion depending on what you want out of your system um but I would probably give a slight Edge to zoren in this case just for the fact they have smartphone connectivity available out of the box should you so desire finally let's talk about quality of life improvements and we'll wrap this up what I've got to say fundamentally is the same that I said at the outset this distribution is based on a very old quote unquote auntu base it is going to have quality of life improvements and Service Pack updates into the coming years but the fact that it's already starting this far behind is a concern for longevity sake mostly as it pertains to hardware and Hardware compatibility with the kernel I think about some of the new stuff that's coming out from Intel um and how will that work with existing Linux kernels especially ones that need to that are LTS releases uh I don't know but as it pertains to most users uh I think you should be fine on zorin um for the foreseeable future and there are quite a few people still running um Zoran OS 16 which is based on a kernel and a hardware enablement stack that's from 2020 which is pretty impressive uh so there is a lot more going on with quality of life updates that the Zoran team put into their packaging uh then Linux Mint tends to uh slingshot off the success of auntu and it's pretty closely in step behind them in terms of what kind of Hardware they can enable through the kernel and drivers and other things having said that if you care about having uh the more upto-date uh features and having more configuration customization and control over your system then Linux Mint is going to appeal to you overall as a project however if you want curation and you want polish then Zar OS is going to be the way to go what I would say is that the wow factor is definely present with zorin none of that's changed and if you're en if you're encountering Zoran for the very first time and you're deciding which Dro to start off with then zorin is going to be a great bet for you the funny thing is though is that for me personally as I've gotten on and foodel around with most open source projects over more than a decade I actually come to appreciate curation more and more for now I'll be staying with Linux Mint but if I had to pick between which of these projects I would recommend for a brand new user it would be zoren because while the things I care about might be better served in Linux Min the stuff that most average users care about an up-to-date browser a polished user interface that makes sense uh wide software and Hardware compatibility is all here on Zaron let me know if you'd like a deep dive into what Zaron OS Pro offers versus the core but you can go and find both of them at their website go and check out Linux Mint at Linux mint's website and just give them both a try even in their live USB form and uh and you're not going to be disappointed with either whether you're running Zaron OS 17 the brand new release that'll be out now as of this video or whether you're running uh Linux Mint 21.3 which is uh due out any day now as well uh look it's a great time to be a Linux user and to start looking around at Alternatives so subscribe if you're new I'll see you in the next one thanks for [Music] watching [Music] a

Channel: InfinitelyGalactic

Views: 65,333

Keywords: infinitelygalactic, technology, linux, open-source, free software, ubuntu, alternatives to windows, alternatives to macos, distro reviews, app reviews, zorin os 17, zorin os 17 vs linux mint, linux mint 21.3, zorin os 17 pro

Id: TTQkICBQtqA

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023