Zorin 15.1 - An Alternative for Windows and MacOS Users?

hello welcome back to the O TV channel are you looking for an alternative to Windows or perhaps Mac OS especially now the Windows 7 has reached end-of-life well Zorin OS claims to be a decent replacement let's see if it is okay welcome back so I was looking at why I should do today and one of the distros that keeps raising its head is Zorin OS it's no bun to base distro that's targeted at Windows and Mac OS users and it makes a lot of great claims I've not used it before this is going to be the first time that I'm looking at it so I've downloaded the ISO we're going to fire it up and we're going to see if its claims are justified before we do this let's just have a quick look at the Zorin OS website and go to the split screen so you should see the Zorin OS website in front of you it's very colourful lots of moving images and it claims your computer easier Zoro Zorin OS is the alternative to Windows and Mac OS designed to make your computer faster more powerful secure and privacy respecting okay what else does it do well it's designed to be easy so you won't need to learn anything to get started apparently the zoning sorry an appearance app lets you change the desktop to resemble in the environment you familiar with whether it's Windows Mac or Linux yes you do get a chance to change the environment slightly but my understanding is you only get the full range of choices if you pay for this operating system and we'll come back to that in a second what else does it claim that it's rock solid and reliable built on a bun - I believe it's built on the a bun a bun - LTS distro and it runs on the same open source software that powers the US Department of Defense NASA and more it's resistant to viruses resistant to viruses that's a strange use of words certainly Linux is less prone to viruses than Windows because it's inherently more secure and to be honest it's just less viruses out there but resistant to viruses if somebody went all out to create a Linux virus I'm not so sure that that would necessarily be the case it's just a strange way of putting things speedy on computers old and new it works lightning fast and doesn't slow down with updates the light Edition runs snappy on computers as old as 15 years ok what else the power to do anything from a full Microsoft Office compatible office suite to professional photo editing software it comes with powerful apps out the box okay I'm assuming by a full Microsoft Office compatible office suite they are talking about Libre Office I wouldn't describe that as full compatibility in terms of the way it renders Microsoft Office documents especially complex ones but fine let's wait and see your data belongs to you Zorin doesn't collect personal data so advertisers and governments can't spy on your activity and you can have the source code okay so it's compatible flexible and accessible so lots of claims and clearly geared up for people who are perhaps moving from windows or mac OS so if we hit the download Zorin link let's see what we actually get unleash your computer download for only 39 your O's why does it cost well it helps Linux thrive well it certainly helps the Zorin developers thrive okay so that is for what I believe is the Zirin Ultimate Edition so if we wanted to download Zorin ultimate it's gonna cost us 39 euros okay what about anything else there have we got options I'm just quickly flicking through the websites here ah editions ultimate they also do core so core is free I believe core is based on gnome and they also do a lite version which I believe is based on xfce the ultimate version I believe has both desktop environments in or that's what I'm given to understand what's the difference is there a comparison section here yes there is all editions contain Libre Office the advanced desktop based on gnome well all editions except light because that has xfce xoring connect it connects your phone and computer all except the light condition Edition should I say standard desktop layouts are available to all premium desktop layouts Mac OS gnome in a bun - okay that's only available in the the Ultimate Edition educational apps and games okay so there is an education Edition there and so it goes on I'm certainly not going to download the Ultimate Edition that's for sure if I click on download for the Ultimate Edition does it make me pay straight away yes it would appear that it does and actually 39 euros is not quite what it's going to cost because the ads on tasks are tax of 7 euros 80 taking us to 4680 right okay look let's download the ISO I'm going to down the core addition which is one down from ultimate will fire it up in VirtualBox and we'll see what we think right so I've downloaded the core Edition 2.18 gigs the ISO I've loaded it into VirtualBox I've given it to cores or two threads of my i5 processor eight gig of ram and I've created a 40 gig virtual drive I've also set it up to boot in EFI mode so let's click start and see what happens so far so good let's see oh right ok the boot screen comes up fairly quick try or install Soren there's a safe graphics mode there's an Nvidia mode and this check installation medium for defects or you can power off from here ok so far so good let's just hit the default and see what happens as you know VirtualBox tends to be a bit dodgy with the fi implementations but we'll see how Sauron copes with that well the answer to that would seem to be pretty good it's booted quite quickly and we now get the opportunity to try Zahran or installs are in you know I think I'm just gonna go straight for the install and then we'll look around it once its installed so let's click install sorry no s let's set our keyboard English UK I don't know if this is the standard Bickel Ubiquiti installer download updates while installing yes install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi yes don't participate in the census right so the census lets the Zorin OS developers count the number of users anonymously right I don't have too much of a problem with that but I would like to be given the option to opt in and to tick a box to opt-in I have to tick a box to opt out here and so because it's that way around I'm gonna tick the box to opt-out just me feeling awkward right let's continue with this and see where it gets us to okay we've got a slight delay while it sorts itself out and we have the spinny disc what do we want to do um erase disk and installs our in OS well we're on a brand new virtual disk so let's just go with the default and click install now if you continue the following will be written okay so it's recognized we're in the fi mode it's going to create an ESP presumably fat32 partition and a root partition formatted as ext4 no swap from what I can see but let's just hit continue it's picked up the timezone correctly and let's get on and do the normal thing and put in my name so ot be my normal or secure password and I don't want to log in automatically I want my password to let me log in and off it goes and it does the installation I'll speed this section up and we'll come back once its installed [Music] [Music] [Music] right so it's now installed we started about quartz as quarter - and it's now 157 so by my reckoning that's about 12 minutes so a fairly boring installation no slideshow to watch but that's not really what it's all about it's what the operating system looks like once we boot up the installation so I'm going to shut this down now I'm gonna remove the ISO and once I've done that I'll boot into the full system install guest additions if required and we'll have a look around Zorin right welcome back so I removed the ISO and booted into the install system put it into full-screen mode and it immediately went straight away to full HD which is great I haven't had to mess about with VirtualBox guest additions so here we have Zirin it's a very clean looking screen I have to say I'm not sure whether I like the wallpaper but that's neither here nor there let's see what else might be available so organized sorry change background there we go oh the software updater is ready right so at the moment if I see a have an option to set a background for the lock screen and a background for the screen itself so let's just hit background and we have a number of wallpapers here by the look of it some of them seem to be quite nice quite scenic I'm not that keen on the pastel shades which seem to come by default let's have a look what it's like and just click select I think that's quite nice yeah that looks a lot better and it's asking me do I want to install updates and I don't think I'm gonna do that now we may run that afterwards just to see how it works so let's walk around a little bit so over here we have the software store so let's launch that and see what we get and it would appear to be your standard sort of software store that we get with the likes of Ubuntu so we can see what's already installed and we can see what else we can install from here and we can search for specifics so Magnus chromium PowerShell TrackMania ok fine tusk opera aura it seems to be a rather strange set of defaults which is showing but I suppose we could go to audio and video and see what we've got there yeah a lot of the standard sort of applications that we'd expect let's go back from there graphics and photography is already installed according to this so that's always a good sign and everything else I mean a great thing about these software stores although I prefer to install from synaptic or on the command line they do make life easy so let's just install chrome chromium should I say it asks me for my password and off it goes doing its thing so if a new user whether from Windows Mac or another Linux distro comes over to Zirin they're not gonna have any problems as far as installing apps is concerned while that gets on with what it's doing let's have a look at the menu not quite sure what this menu is it doesn't have anything on the right click interface to actually have a look at but it's based on gnome so if we go to accessories we've got calculator is that Google Maps let's just click on that and see hmm okay maybe Google Maps maybe not Google Maps right we'll just knock that off I think what else have we got in accessories a text editor okay and what's this have we gotten about it's get it right which I sort of suspected we'd know anything else in there to do weather let's go back games okay we've already got a few games installed including mahjong and mine's graphics we have a document viewer we have the libreoffice drawer and Shotwell also simple scan okay in internet we have Firefox as the default browser which is good and romina for a remote desktop in office we appear to have the full libreoffice suite which is great sound and video we've got brassiere oh cheese / TV which I'm given to understand is a little bit like kdenlive rhythm box and their videos app I wonder what the videos app is let's just open it up okay I presume it's gnome videos or something equivalent we'll just knock that off for now I'm not familiar with the gnome interface so I wouldn't pretend that I'm familiar with all the different apps that they have as default we have gnome discs in some settings for power the software store the updater which is the standard Ubuntu up data by the look of it startup applications xoring connect and Zorin appearance let's click on Zorin appearance and see what this does so it gives us the option of a number of different pre baked themes I believe the ultimate version gives us more choices here but without paying for it I didn't seem to have the option to download it so we have this layout at the moment what happens if I click the middle one okay it reduces the panel at the bottom the menu looks pretty similar I don't think there's a lot of difference there so it's a smaller panel essentially and what about the last one aha we're back to Nome I think I'm gonna pick the middle one with a slightly smaller panel and we have a few other settings here do we want to see mounted volumes the rubbish bin home etc on our desktop and network servers on the title bar do we want our buttons to be on the left hand side or the right hand side and enable animations what about the themes okay so it's picked an accent color for us there and it's asking what background we would like so let's click that one all right this is one of these settings that changes given the ambient light so let's just go straight away to their dark theme and I have to say a quite like the dark theme their applications what do we want we won't add waiter add way too dark high contrast let's pick out way too dark actually that's nicer than the actual black and what icons do we want to pick let's try sorry 95 and see what they're like yeah I'm not sure I like the color there what about just high color okay they're the standard sort of icons we'd expect high contrast oh yes so we're into the black and white there okay well let's see what the Czar in 95 theme is like Gray's now I'm gonna go with that add way too dark and I'm gonna pick Azure in 95 as the as the theme I suppose I could get used to that the shell theme is or in 95 that seems to be the only option their fonts into regular Roboto regular I've not heard of them before but fine and the panel where do we want it top or bottom we can adjust its height its opacity show activities button weather we also hide a clocks and calendar etc etc so we go we can obviously play around with that to some extent so I think chromium is installed now let's just double check yes it is so that was system tools let's go down Zahran connect so this is where we sync our phones notifications with the computer browse photos from the phone and reply to SMS messages on our desktop share files and web links between devices and use the phone as a remote control for your computer ok well theoretically that sounds good let's hit next devices it's searching for devices ok let's see if it has any luck I've got an iPhone rather than an Android device and I don't know whether this is just for Android devices but we're letting it search for devices and see what it does hmmm so far it doesn't seem to be finding anything it's connected to the same network as my phone so I don't see why it shouldn't find anything but I tell you what we'll let it get on with that and we'll go back to the menu so we looked at system tools let's have a look at utilities so we've got the archive manager disk usage fonts image viewer logs a system monitor let's see what it's actually using here right well I'm in VirtualBox and I'm using this connected app at the moment it doesn't seem to be finding my iPhone so I'm gonna leave that for the time being if I shut that off what are we on 1.4 gigs of memory right ok it's not using a huge amount of CPU but 1.4 gig of memory isn't that lightweight I think we have to forgive it at the moment though because it's in VirtualBox and we're not getting a true representation of what it really is do we have a terminal here I presume we do at somewhere at least not there apparently what about accessories no utilities aha there's our terminal okay so presumably I can just do sudo apt update we can get the typing right so just a brief interlude here I decided to have a little bit of a play installing a few things and I'd obviously don't want to waste your time see me use the command-line constantly so I'm just breaking up the video and we'll go back as I'm installing audacity so let's I don't know let's try audacity so sudo apt install audacity yeah all looking good so you can use the command line as much as you ever did and there you go it's just about installed now what I have done I've saved you the the time it would take to watch me install other things on here but I did actually install a CH top as well so let's just take a quick look at H top and you'll see that using H top now that I've got everything shut shut down it's come down to one point three six gig the RAM usage so it's slightly less than we saw before but it's not exactly what I'd call lightweights I've also installed synaptic so let's open that up there we go and I've really done this just to have a look at the repos so it looks to be the standard Ubuntu repos and as I suspected we've got lots of Zoran PPAs and their own packages there as well which is how they install things that give it that particular Zoran look and feel okay what about a driver manager have we got anything called driver manager it doesn't seem to have that strangely enough if we go into settings so we have Wi-Fi Bluetooth appearance we've been there already universal access privacy privacy okay fine and something called devices Oh undetailed what details give us okay just pretty much standard details about the operating systems Orion 15.1 let's have a look at devices so there's our display it is indeed 1920 by 1080 we can scale it there it's got our refresh letter rate but no driver manager strangely enough details about our keyboard so shortcuts keystrokes the Mau Maus and touchpad the printer oh well I'm I'm quite surprised at that it's picked up my printer already which is pretty impressive to be honest additional printer settings what's it got there there are no printers configured and not accepting jobs well let's click Add network printer find network printer there we go let's do it driverless forward searching for drivers now which is fine and forward again and forward again and apply strange that it appeared there but it wasn't ready to accept jobs let me hit the print test page and see if anything happens you should be able to you can hear the printer now okay so printing is as simple as that with the Canon mg 5600 which can be a little bit iffy with some distros so I'll let it get on with its job and we'll come back in a second when the printer has stopped making the noise well the good news is that printed fine so that was good to see test page on canon mg 5600 printed I'm always impressed when a distro can do that so in terms of functionality so far so good I'm still a little bit confused about where the driver manager is I'm hoping I'm not missing anything here right so I've gone off and I've done some research I was doing something wrong as far as the device drivers were concerned they are on the system I was missing them I'll show you that in a minute and as far as the xoring connect app is concerned it appears to be an Android only application and you do need to download an app from the Google Play Store to get your Android phone working with it so that said let's go and have a look at where the driver application is right so I was concerned about where the driver manager was so I went off and did a little bit of research and apparently it can be asks access from the software up data you just click on settings which brings up all the standard repos and it also has a section for addition all drivers so you can install from here as you can see it's saying the VirtualBox guest service is not working continue using a manually installed driver okay fine so if you using Nvidia or something like that you would no doubt update from there okay well let's go and have a chat about this so that's Zorin OS what do I think about it well everything seems to function as it should the connect app obviously works with Android phones I haven't got an Android phone so I couldn't test that but apart from that it's it's pretty solid and I'd expect it to be solid given its a bun - LTS bass it's got its own look and feel a very flat clean look and feel and compared to your standard gnome desktop I preferred it I don't like the pastel colors I'm not overly keen on the desktop environment generally but that is just personal preference I think they make quite a lot of statements about how easy it is and how similar it is to Windows and how similar it is to Mac OS and it's a similar as any other Linux system in my view it's all about look and feel and those of you who have been using Linux for a while know how easy it is to customize the look and feel would a Windows user or a Mac OS user find the system easy to use yes I think they would at the end of the day though the only thing that separates Zahran as far as I could see from any other a bomb - based distro is customized look and feel that's what it comes down to and if you like the customize look and feel and you like the ability to be able to switch layouts very quickly it might well be for you would I use it probably not as you know I'm trialing linux mint and peppermint at the moment on my little ThinkPad x1 31 II and I'm starting to really enjoy using peppermint I have to say and I'd choose that over Zoran but at the end of the day Zoran is another decent operating system it has some downsides the downsides are I certainly don't like the the fact that you have to pay for the Ultimate Edition and you don't get chance to install a demo to see if you like it to start off with over 40 euros I think is quite expensive for a Linux system that you can essentially download and customize for free if you prepared to spend the time if they would give you a trial and then offer you the option of contributing I think that would be fairer I didn't like the fact that I had to explicitly opt out of sending user data and one thing I did also notice when I typed the password after doing sudo it came up with the Stars which showed exactly how many characters I was typing which you don't normally get so that could be a concern as far as security is concerned but let's not get too finicky about it if you like the look and feel it's an easy operating system to work with and go for it give it a spin this is probably going to be the last of the distro reviews I do for a week or two I have a ramble plan for next week because I have lots to catch up with you on not least of which my new cabin come studio is now being completed so I want to talk to you about that but until next week have a great weekend and I'll see you then [Music]

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 13,118

Keywords: oldtechbloke, linux, zorin os 15.1, zorin os core, zorin os, zorin os 15, zorin os review, zorin os 15.1 review, zorin 15.1, zorin os 15.1 core, zorin os review 15, linux distro like mac os, zorin 15.1 review, whats new zorin15.1, best linux distro 2019, zorin os the best windows replacement, how to use zorin os, dark mode zorin os 15.1, zorin os windows layout, zorin os 15 core, best linux distro 2019 for beginners, how to install zorin, zorin mac replacement, linux review

Id: zVrykZfWvic

Length: 36min 25sec (2185 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 08 2020