What’s New in ZorinOS 16 Lite?

zoranos is not one of those distros that i've spent a lot of time with so i'm not all that familiar with it i know the general concept of it and i know that they specif specifically target new users and i know that they have done a really good job in making their desktop environments their own without having to go through and actually fork a desktop environment and creating or creating a new one so those that's about the depth of my knowledge of zoronos so i thought it was about time that i actually took a look at one of their releases so today we're going to be taking a look at zoronos 16 lite and now this comes with a curry customized version of xfce and it should be really pretty so we're going to take a look at it let's go ahead and jump in so while we're waiting we know that zorin os is based on ubuntu and i believe it's based on the latest lts but i could be wrong about that we'll check that once we get in there so we have some nice animations here and we have a cool wallpaper so this looks like the ubiquity installer so we're just going to go ahead and install it right off the bat we'll see what it looks like after we've done the install so this is english english us that's correct we'll hit continue we don't want to download updates we'll just do all those at the end because you'd have to update anyways might do them all at once and then we don't want to participate participate in the census this time and we'll keep the codex stuff go ahead and do next or continue okay so we have the regular partition thing here if do they offer you they do offer zfs here so if you want to use zfs you can do so you also encrypt your drive here still no option here to have separate home and partitions automatically selected for you so you if you wanted to do separate home partition you'd have to go through and do that yourself i wish more installers would go through and actually enable you to do the separate home partition with their automatic partitioning tools instead of having to go through and do the partitioning yourself because that would be a really cool but honestly there's not a lot of distress out that do that so we'll go ahead and hit install now and then continue i will say without any borders around this this stuff kind of blends in you know what i mean but being a little judgy matt and then new york is fine we'll enter my name here and we'll call this zorin vm and that is fine and we'll enter a super duper password and then we will go ahead and hit continue and it's going to hit install i will go ahead and cut the video here and we'll come back when it's done okay there we go it looks like it took about five minutes or so so about normal in terms of installation of ubuntu disk based distro so i'm going to go ahead and restart we'll see if it actually ends up removing the iso from the boot partition but we'll see sometimes vm the virtual machine does sometimes it doesn't and it did awesome okay so let's go ahead and enter our super duper password and this is xfce like you've never seen it before i would say now we have a little bit of a tour so we'll go ahead and hit start tour so open the menu to launch apps okay so you can see right away that this is kind of funneled towards new users because most people are going to know that's what you do but you can tell how they've done the tour that that's who they're focusing on you can choose your desktop look with zero on appearance because let's go ahead and launch that while we're here so let's see so we got two different options here and we can either do this one which is we're on or this one which appears just to make the launcher icons down here to go away and change it with more old style windows windows open things uh you can obviously get more layouts by upgrading to their pro version and the last time i tried zara os which i have tried it before briefly i seem to remember them giving you more options but they've changed their layout or the number of distros that they offer versions that they offer so it looks like those are the only two layouts that you get for free not that you can go through and just recreate those if you wanted so here's the dark mode which we're going to change because the dark mode should be the default and we'll change the accent color to purple desktop these icons on desktop but you could do that by default so you don't have to download anything like gnome tweaks or anything if you were using a version genome this is xfce so you should get that well i don't know why they even have to enable that because xfce has i wonder if you turn that off if you can't put any icons on there at all yeah you can't click if you turn that off you can't click on the desktop at all okay i didn't even know that was something that xfce could disable honestly to tell you the truth okay and then you can change fonts here as well okay so that's cool all right moving on to the next thing in the tour set up your speed up your virtual machine install guest edition so it detects automatically that i'm in a virtual machine and offers to install guest additions i'm not going to do that i don't need them but if you are going to be using this in a vm that's cool touch and then this is going to be the software center well we're gonna i'll focus on the software center here and it's like well let's go ahead and go to the next one uh and then this is the it so we'll visit the health page if if we need help and we hit close so that's the tour it's a nice little tour it's not full of a lot of information but you can you know it's not meant to be i don't think uh this is a typical gnome software center thing or snap software center thing which depending on which one it is they both tend to take a long time to load that first time so it looks like they're going to be focusing on flat packs instead of snaps but while we're waiting for that let's go ahead and take a look at the menu shall we so this is going to be there's the software center okay we'll take a look at that in a minute let's go ahead and open up a terminal [Applause] terminal emulator okay so this is xfc for terminal i wonder why that when you search your terminal so this is the terminal emulator here is just like a um like a shortcut to this okay all right so if we do uh you name a we're seeing this is going this is using kernel 5.11 so not the most recent is neofetch installed is not so let's go ahead and do our updates here then while we're here see there shouldn't be too many because this was just released yeah there's not too many so go ahead and do that okay so the updates are done that didn't take very long at all so we'll do sudo apt install neofetch zoom in here a little bit whenever why i bored it i did yes i'll try again did i do something wrong yeah apparently i hit equals yes which i have no clue how i did oh because i was zooming in that's the reason why okay all right so we there we go so this is xfc using the xfwm4 window window manager this is using these themes here these are custom zorn themes you could obviously change those i wonder because normally xfc is a whole bunch of different tools we'll take a look at that those in a minute this is um bash.5.0.17 so i don't believe that's the most recent either and as we said earlier before it's um 5.11 is the kernel we're looking at about 1700 packages which is about normal for debian slash ubuntu based distro and there's 12 flat packs installed okay so let's go ahead and close this out here and we'll come back to software center a little bit later um we don't need to do that we just did that okay so we're going to go ahead and go through the applications here now just real quick interestingly this is how you have to click on the category so we have archive manager clocks fonts on board red shift is here by default xf burn which is still included with a lot of length distributions and i'm not sure why there's some games here nothing unusual nothing like steam or anything pre-installed so you'd have to install that if you wanted to install it graphics we have here and the libreoffice suite as well which is where we'd see in the office here is libreoffice what version of libreoffice we can go ahead and take a look at the libreoffice writer and see what version you get it is nicely themed so it fits in with the rest of the operating system which is nice and they did change if you notice by default libreoffice comes with their standard old and i mean old looking interface this is the tabbed interface by default so they they've changed this to the tab interface by default which is good so we can go here go to surprisingly i can't find oh there we go right there this is version 7.2.3.2 and i believe that's going to be the most recent version but or at least close so that's cool and i i love that they changed the this this should be the libreoffice ui by default i mean yes it looks like word but it's good anyways that is libreoffice let's go ahead and multimedia here i believe we skipped internet so we got cheese all the normal stuff rhythm box for your music pro is that what that is parole media player i've never heard of that before in my life i wonder why they just use uh vlc but that's just that's a choice that a lot of distress make so we have firefox but as a default web browser we have thunderbird as our mail client and here's where i'm interested because xfce has all their its own settings manager but zoran also has its own settings manager so it'll be interesting to see if they've taken anything out so because there are an appearance which we already looked at i'm going to say they haven't actually taken anything out where's this let's see if there's a settings manager here settings okay so yeah this is the xfc settings manager but it looks weird because it's themed right right out of the bat so it looks a little different to me but it's been a long time since i've used xfc you know any for more than like a few minutes but this is going to have the normal fcsxfce stuff in it including your ability to change themes if you wanted to change themes so this would allow you to do things that are outside of the zoran appearance app change icons fonts and settings obviously and then you can go through and change your hardware settings and window manager settings and stuff like that so yeah that is the xfce settings manager so if you're if you're used to using xfce this is still here so that you can still manage your xfce desktop just like you normally would so let's go ahead and open up a web browser here and find the release notes see if we can't see what is different from the last version now you can remember i didn't use the last version i think i did a video on zorons before now that i'm thinking about it but it's been so long ago i don't even remember i've been youtubing now for a whole year and obviously i can't remember every video i've done because memory is for young people um anyway so let's go ahead zorin 16 oops light release notes here we go zero 16 has been refreshed with a revamped and refined appearance out of the box we've introduced the new more polished default theme from zoronos 16 that it's easier on the eyes you'll find detailed touches and delightful animations throughout the item throughout the system let's see if we have i'm guessing that the any animations would be kybosh by the vm so we also have some more artwork and desktop wallpapers which actually we can actually look here if we look at um desktop settings so these are the wallpapers that come pre-installed let's go to something a little bit more summery i guess that's a at least not so wintery outside these are nice there's nothing here specifically zorin brandon branded nice wallpapers it's been closed that that's just the normal xfce wallpaper desktop manager thing a new taskbar with window previews so if we hover over us apparently that's only with the other so let's go ahead and join appearance and choose the other other layout apparently if you hover over the ship you get windows previews okay that's cool okay additional desktop layouts in the pro lite edition those two words don't really go together but okay so the since we're introducing two new desktop layouts for zone os 16 pro lite chrome os like and windows classic like so as we saw here in the appearance if you go through and pay for them you can get some you get the mac layout you'll get windows you'll get something more traditional like you know too i think that's what that kind of looks like uh and actually this more looks like the i bet you that's the more of a chroma wash and this is going to be the windows version but there's no there's absolutely no reason why if you didn't want to shell the cache you couldn't go through and re you know recreate those on your own that's the thing about linux so the windows classic like desktop layout uses a traditional list style taskbar with a simple app menu designed to feel familiar for veteran computer users i just want to tell them that windows hasn't looked like that in a long long time and they did say classic so they were really meaning it the new lights new layouts complement the four other layouts which have been tweaked and improved since toronto's 15 light you'll be able to choose which so i was right you used to be able to get those layouts in the non-pro version at least that's the way it makes the same here you'll be able to choose between those desktop layouts in the layout section of zone appearance so here's a picture of those layouts or at least a couple of the layouts here so we got the mac watch like genome 2 like layout and we have the windows like layout default and the windows list layout so those are cool and they they've apparently gone through and redesigned zorn appearance which is this app here which you where you had opened up um honestly i don't i don't really remember what this looked like before my time with it was really short before as well i think maybe the theme and the layout all this stuff was on just one page and but i could be wrong about that in zero or 16 we refresh the layout to make it even easier to find customization options with the category tabs moved from the top to the left side of the window desktop layouts have been separated into a dedicated tab and you can now set the size of desktop icons independently from the files app okay that's cool oh we didn't look at the files app so we'll look at this so this is going to be i believe this is going to be thunar yep this is thunar dunar is a good uh window manager or excuse me okay good window manager i got window managers on the mind this thundar is a good file manager it's not my favorite anymore i moved to nemo and then i moved obviously to crusader which is not my absolute fave but this is nice i will say that the touch targets on the edges of the windows can be really finicky apparently you can only move it from the top the top seems to work fine but if you hover down here at the bottom getting the the arrow to show up to resize the window is i saw it flash oh there it is yeah that the the target for those the bottom corner seems to be really off so if you can see that i mean you can barely see it with my face there it's uh like it's not really in the corner it's more a little up so that's a little but it's weird because the top and the sides have much better targets okay but anyways that's just a small thing that i noticed okay so let's go ahead and finally take a look at the software center so this is probably genome software yeah it's 3.36 so it's pretty old in terms of where the software center is now uh gnome has gone through and redesigned the software center since this point i believe and uh let's see here we can go through and uh oh yeah this is what i was remembering right here so you can choose from the snap store and uh you can choose several different versions from the snap store and um apparently wonder why i was saying uh at the beginning it was saying update flat pack or something so apparently this comes from snap the snapster i wonder like uh let's choose when we know that it has a a flat hub version uh you can get it from some things from flat hop so so there's their store here pulls from the zoran os repositories from flat hub and from the snap store so that should give you a really broad range of software and it looks like they know what they're doing we're looking at you elementary os this is how you do it i can say yeah this is a store that has is going to pretty much have everything in it so let's just go ahead and search for steam here which steam was right there on the front page so obviously they have it yep they have steam here uh i don't even know what i go through like they have lutos do they have zero id here they do so it looks like the software selection is really really good so it what about something rare like audacium no i didn't quite think so but you can install that using apt i suppose so that's the software center do we get a terminal yep we do get super sus or control t does give us a terminal so we can look for go to h top here h top is not installed we're using about 1.75 gigabytes but we've been opening stuff up so that's not going to be accurate uh it's using 97 tasks 330 threads which is an interesting thing we also have firefox open so we can close that and that should get us some yeah that took off quite a bit of memory usage there as well as like half the threads oh firefox what are we gonna do with you that's crazy okay anyways um most of what the member the cpu usage looks like these resize targets is going to be mostly the xorg stuff that is i'm going to i'm just very curious i'm going to go ahead and restart this and um check and see what the memory is when it's fresh because i'm very curious because xfce is very light right that's the point of xfce like i'm talking like what 600 megabytes is what it should use around there so we'll see what it is so free dash m is using 602 that's exactly what it should that's exactly what it should that was a pretty good memory there matt that you remembered that anyways so yeah it's using xfc it's just as light as you'd expect it to be uh and firefox still uses a ton of threads imagine that okay so anyways that is zoron os 16 lite the free version and overall it's very good if you're switching from windows this would be a really good option for you because not only is the ui familiar but also the it has a ton of software in the software center just a ton of selection and you won't ever have to worry about whether it's pulling from flat pack or snap or zorin as long as the application that you're looking for is there chances are if you're a new user you're never going to notice that drop down at the top there the software center anyways you're just going to say hey look steam is here install and it's going to install and you're going to go about your married days of playing games and stuff so i think this is a great new user distro um whether or not it would be for me i it would be fine i could go through and make it my own but i don't think that i'd ever keep those the the themes that it has it's just a little bit too flat for me and it's really especially you noticed in in libreoffice how everything was just kind of like a flat pain and there's no definition to any of the buttons and stuff i don't want skeromorphism but i also don't want complete flat i want to be able to see especially in like a dark or blinding white mode uh some definition to the where you're supposed to click uh should would be good so i would change the themes but that's not you know hard at all with xfc you don't have to install tweak tool or anything you just go ahead and you know use the theme manager from xfc that is built in uh so that that is zoranos 16 lite if you have thoughts on this distro you can leave those in the comment section below you can follow me on twitter at the linux cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com linuxcast before i go i'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons cid a devon chris east coast webb gents function patrick l primus marcus meglin jackson tools steve a mitchell art center amateurs merrick camp joshua lee j dog the beast's rap peter aiden crucible thanks everybody for watching i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: The Linux Cast

Views: 1,029

Keywords: linux, open source, apps, zorin os 16 lite, first look, review, whats new in zorin os 16, lite

Id: X9xhLcprlqw

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021