Zorin OS 16 - Linux For The Average Computer User

hello and welcome to the otb channel today we're going to do a distro review we're going to look at zorin os 16. see you after the intro [Music] okay welcome back so um i'm sure like most of you out there we we've seen the liners tech tips channel and how they're doing a little bit of a linux channel challenge at the moment um i've only seen snippets and uh i've seen how they've struggled and that they're essentially gamers and uh they seem to be facing a number of challenges moving to linux but at the end of the day you know it's a huge channel linus tech tips and the fact that they're trying linux for the first time i think it's going to get the name of linux out there because let's face facts most ordinary computer new users probably haven't got a clue that linux even exists and when they actually see a linux system for the first time joe public you know your average joe probably isn't going to be like many of us many of us geeks or you know technically um orientated people if if they're looking for a different operating system perhaps because windows 11 isn't going to work for them for whatever reason they just want an alternative that works they probably want something quite familiar they want something that isn't going to stretch them too much they're not interested in messing about with text files or doing too much configuration they just want to boot into it and they want to do what they normally do i always think of my wife as the typical computer user she uses a laptop she uses word processing she uses a web browser and to be honest that's pretty much it oh she plays a little bit of music on it i would hazard a guess that the majority of computer users out there probably aren't looking for anything more complicated or detailed than that so there's certainly a market out there for a linux distro that appeals to the majority of computer users out there who aren't geeks and just allows them to get on with the job without worrying too much about the system which started me thinking this week that you know are there systems out there that that can do that job and be really easy for a windows user and i've seen that zorin seems to be getting an awful lot of love at the moment about being easy to use and how well put together it is so i thought i'd give it a look let's go and have a look at their website so here we are on the combined screen and you should be able to see the zorin os website there and first impressions are it looks very professional um nothing there to put you off there's not too much text it's clean and it's easy to read tells you that this is how to make your computer more reliable secure faster better etc etc and there's an immediate link to download and as you go down it talks about how the zorin desktop is familiar you can change the layout to suit your environment and if you're a windows or a mac os user or even a linux user you're already going to know how to use it so so it's very much going on about you're not going to struggle to get used to this operating system it runs lightning fast it can revive your old pc and there yeah no tpm required the trusted platform module that uh windows 11 requires so you can actually use a computer as old as 15 years with zorin not a problem what do we have here we have a few little uh pieces of uh information about how reliable and secure it is and privacy respecting with lots of different apps a little bit about gaming using steam lutrus and other sources zorin connect which allows you to connect your mobile device to to the operating system to dual boot alongside windows and how it's going to be compatible with your existing files okay so all good so let's go to the download link and there's two options here you can download zorin os pro now i believe the pro has more layouts or themes if you like than the free version professional grade applications i'm not quite sure what they mean by that advanced productivity software includes a pro lite edition for old pcs and support for the development of soaring operating system let's have a look at that so what has it actually got oh it has a whole range of different desktop layouts including a windows 11 layout apparently standard layouts professional grade creative suites productivity software okay well all good but let's let's go back to the normal i don't want to pay 39 pounds excluding that not that 39 pound is a lot a lot of money and i've got no problem with developers earning money but if you're coming to this for the first time you may want to try one of the free versions first to see if it suits you and in terms of that we have core and light so core i believe is based on gnome but it doesn't actually look anything like gnome it's its own thing um so yeah that's a good thing i don't like the default look of gnome so and i think that would be quite off-putting to to new users and you have a light version which i'm assuming i could be wrong here is going to be based on something like xfce yes it is here so the advanced desktop is advanced desktop is based on gnome and the lightweight desktop is based on xfce so what i've done for this is is i've downloaded the core version i'm going to fire it up in virtualbox let's have a look see so you should see now on your screens zorin os i've just booted from the iso in virtual box and initially when you boot you're given the option of install straight away or try so i've selected try and it's booted into this desktop first impressions very clean very light um it looks quite familiar it's quite windows-like which is what i was expecting to be honest and we will go through in more detail once it's installed but for now let's get on and do the install we have the icon up here installs are in os 16 so double click on that and see where it takes us i just want to check really that this is what we would expect a ubiquity or calamaris install which should be fairly straightforward and here we are our welcome screen saying what language do we want to set so it's defaulted to english so i'm just going to click continue we'll set english uk as our keyboard layout download updates while installing zorin os yeah absolutely install third-party software for graphics and wi-fi yeah actually i would always tick that anyway especially if i'm installing on a laptop just to make sure that i do stand a chance of getting decent wi-fi support don't participate in the census so what's the census the census lets the zorin os developers count the number of users anonymously i'm not that keen on the fact that don't participate in the census isn't clicked by default but i'm going to click it anyway if i was installing it i wouldn't have too much of a problem with it but as i'm just doing a virtual box install it doesn't really seem worth it so it would give false statistics really so the next screen takes us to how do you want to install so erase disk and install zorin os yeah sure i'm going to go for that advanced features what does that include okay so you can set up lvm or you can erase the disk and use zfs okay fine or something else well let's erase the disk and install zorin it summarizes what it's going to do so it's going to create an ext4 partition okay that's interesting i don't seem to have got the option here to set a swap partition but let's just continue it's picked the right time zone for me i get the impression he wants to ask users as little as possible here which is understandable if you're trying to bring people across from alternative operating systems so let's just set up my username otb i'll choose a password and yes it's short do i want to log in automatically no i think i'd uh like to require my password to log in use active directory that's really interesting you enter your domain and other details in the next step so it really is geared up for people who could be on a an active directory domain at work that's the first time i've seen that on a linux desktop i think that's really useful and that's it it's going to install so i won't put you through the pain of this we'll just carry on with the install and we'll come back once i reboot into the install system and we're back installation took about 10 minutes or so it was installing updates obviously which i selected during the installation so perhaps took a little bit longer because of that but it went flawlessly there was no issues and as you can see i've now booted into my install system and i'm immediately welcomed with uh welcome to zorino s 16. do i want to take a tour well i probably won't go through the the full tour but i just want to see what it offers it tells you how to open the menu choose your desktop look speed up your virtual machine it's detected i'm on a vm um okay great connect your online accounts link your phone and computer with zorin connect i think that's something like kde connect in the background use software to find and install apps choose the office suite that works best with the documents that you use and libreoffice it says is already installed which is great but if you want to use only office by all means do it um so what's it saying here it works best with docx so it's recommending only office if you're using microsoft office documents now the hardened uh linux evangelists amongst us may have a problem with that because libreoffice works fine with microsoft office on the whole but i suppose if you're trying to ensure maximum compatibility why not it's up to zorin and it's up to the user who's installing that's it we hope that you enjoy sorry note os and immediately that we close that we see that uh an update has been issued i'm just going to click remind me later for that i don't want to go through updates while i'm doing a demo so we get this very clean desktop um now i'm not going to pretend that this is an operating system i would install as i said in the introduction um linux tends to be quite niche and within that niche there is an even smaller niche of people who like to tweak and fiddle and like window managers etc etc and i come from that that sort of tiny niche as you know from many of my videos but i'm trying to approach this review here as if i was someone who has never used linux before and this is my first view of a linux operating system and i have to say from what i can see so far it looks fine i know this is ultimately based on gnome i don't think gnome looks particularly uh friendly for a user who's never seen anything like that there's no familiar familiarity with it but this looks very windows like and as a new win user to linux i would probably just go straight here to the menu and uh i'm essentially seeing what i would expect so very windows like in terms of the shortcuts to different things here and of course you have um all your menu items here so let's just have a quick look through so accessories clocks maps a text editor a to-do program on weather games okay so you have a few things installed by default solitaire ma ma jung minds etc about in graphics you have the installed by default um i think that's great i know the can be quite difficult to use and uh i fought with it a few times but it is incredibly powerful and if somebody wants to learn it it's good to have it there already a photos application an image viewer and of course we have libreoffice draw there what about internet firefox is installed by default and we have romina which is your uh remote desktop client if you you want to remote into well not just a windows box another linux box and if you've got a windows user that might be an essential application that they're looking for with office yeah pretty much what i would expect i see the evolution email client is there i have to say i haven't used evolution since the days of known 2 but i was an evolution user and if you're using something like or you've been used to using something like microsoft outlook again that will be very familiar to you sound and video brasiro so okay we've we've got a cd stroke dvd burning application there i think the days of having computers where you need a cd or dvd burning application are dying out uh i haven't actually got a dvd drive on any of my laptops not even the older thinkpads um but i suppose if somebody's got an older computer it's useful to have that cheese for your webcam for tv which i believe is is a known version of kden live almost rhythm box for your music a sound recorder and a video player it's interesting i'm noting here that they're not necessarily using the names of the applications they're just putting them as videos whatever that happens to be system tools so you have your driver manager your disk application power stats your software updater startup applications zorin appearance and last but not least utilities okay all the normal stuff that you would expect so a decent selection of software to start you off nothing that's going to confuse you if you've never been on a linux system before it's all pretty straightforward and explained in in normal words so what have we got on the right click menu new folder new document show desktop in files let's just click on that and see what it does okay so it's opening up my file explorer and if we go here about files i'm assuming this is nautilus or what used to be called nautilus but okay it's fine there's your file manager your documents your downloads your music folder and clearly it's not got anything in at the moment opening terminal okay change background let's have a look at the backgrounds that we have as default okay we have a few here a decent selection to get you started they're all quite lightly themed what's that one like i quite like that okay in fact we'll stick with that for the time being uh i'm assuming let's just make this full screen but this is essentially your gnome settings application so sound power yes it is displays you can see i'm on full hd here there was no issues in virtual box getting it to go in into full hd your printers removable media default applications all the normal stuff that you would perhaps expect so let's just shut that down and let's see what we can find in themes and i noticed the appearance program is here on the main menu so let's click on zorin appearance and see what it brings up okay so it starts off with the the layouts i'm actually quite surprised that the layouts are in this sort of black and white uh look obviously if you've installed the zorin os pro you'll have more layouts and i see there's a link here to upgrade to zorino os pro in this in this application window i would suggest i i know zorin os pro is offered on the website for 39 pounds if you're considering getting the full zorino s pro i would personally recommend you download core first which i've done which is free and you always have the option to upgrade to zorin os pro later so let's just see if we can change themes and see what they're like so that's made an immediate change to uh our bar down here as it made a change to the menu no i think the menu is the same looking at that so not a huge difference there what about the next layout right so that's uh that's brought our windows 11 look really so we've got our icons in the middle of the bar what about our menu okay so that's more of your traditional gnome style menu which you can scroll through i see this firewall configuration there as well which which is excellent your driver manager you know there's not too many applications here but there is just enough so zorin connect um i wonder if i click on that what it actually tells me connect your computer with your mobile device yeah whether it's a specialized zorin application or or something based on kde connect um i'm not sure but it's going to do the same sort of job i think here you've probably got enough to be getting on with and of course you've got your driver manager there to find out if there's any drivers that you could install and let's have a look at this okay so now we have a toolbar here at the top and right we've still got our gnome menu and it's more of a traditional no gnome look this we're with our our little panel here which already has a few items installed do you know i'm going to go back to uh the original one and it seems to change over pretty quickly um when i looked at makulu the other week which also had layouts that that took quite a long time to change over but this is going pretty fast so as i say you can get more desktop layouts if you upgrade to to pro so let's have a look at uh the theme its appearance not everybody likes a dark theme i have to say that i do i really do let's see if i can change it to a dark theme here yep absolutely and has that applied to my file manager as well yes it has and i do like that i have to say i also get the opportunity here to choose the accents so i can choose green hmm i don't know that i like that orange red purple okay or gray of all of those i think i prefer personally the uh the blue accent you also get the opportunity to uh choose something else all right so this is for your icon set it's on add waiter by the look of it from the start and what you want your shell to be i don't seem to have an option there to click anything what about the interface right would you want uh the title bar buttons the left or right hand side enable animations jelly mode so i've heard a lot about this i don't know if this will work actually in their virtual box but let's just enable it oh god yeah there we are if you like jelly mode drive it would drive me absolutely mad to be honest so so i'm going to click that off and because i'm in virtualbox i think i'm also going to turn off the animations um so left super key what you want it to do activities overview hot corner and taskbar settings let's bring that up and see what it says so how big do you want your panel to be small or large okay and it does it straight away okay so that's nice and simple uh intellihide you want it to hide when you've got other applications open and you want to change the background opacity which is already set at 40 by default where'd you want it to be um okay bottom or perhaps top or left all right let's just set it back to normal and you've pretty much got uh all the available options here to to say where do you want uh you know the applications button to be the taskbar the center box everything else behavior show favorite applications and the action button to say what happens when you do a particular click okay right i quite like that the desktop do you want icons on the desktop i would always like my home icon on the desktop and my rubbish bin i don't generally have mounted volumes on the desktop but good to have the option here and fonts you get to choose what you want so in terms of layout and look and feel i quite like that look i've got to say i do like the icon set i think it's the standard icons that come with gnome now um but yeah all good i'm not going to go into huge detail here on this desktop i just this is this is a first look as much as anything else but yes it's a very windows like desktop it feels very familiar to me what have i got here i've got over in the taskbar here details of my internet connection uh also of my my volume and of course i can power on and log off there they're all one button of course they're not separate buttons and the time and date so it is what it is it's it's a straightforward relatively plain desktop um that gives you a base to build on and for someone coming over to linux you're not going to be disappointed at seeing this not by any stretch of the imagination you've already got an email client a web browser you've got a file manager oh i'll tell you what we haven't looked at we haven't looked at the software store and i'm pleased to say after after just uh clicking that for the first time unlike many distros that i've seen it hasn't had to go off and refresh it's already populated with uh a whole range of different things i believe it uses dead files flat packs snaps the works um let's for instance uh oh i don't know let's click on thunderbird does it tell us what it is yeah so thunderbird is a snap there and to install all i do is click that enter my password and you can see it's installing couldn't be easier i've seen a lot of software stores in the past and uh personally i never use them i i tend to install from the command line but as i said before i am not an ordinary computer user i'm a hobbyist a linux hobbyist and i've been using the system for 17 years now the linux system so i've obviously got my preferences about what i want to do with the system someone new to linux is probably just going to want something that is easy for them to get used to and i think this does the job i think it's probably designed to appeal to you windows users more than anybody else there are other distros out there that would appeal more to mac users but given the opportunities at the moment for new window users to perhaps come across to linux i think zorin probably deserves the love that it's been getting we'll just wait for that to install and check that it appears in the menu and then we'll go off and have a chat so that's now installed so let's just check in the menu uh under internet and there we have uh thunderbird mail oh right i know what i need to check just before we go and have a chat let's just have a look at the system monitor to see what it's ram usage is like 1.4 gigs okay um this isn't going to be ultra lightweight you do have the option of installing a lightweight version if you have a very low powered computer 1.4 gigs isn't terrible most people will have more than enough ram in their computers to use that right guys that's it for the review right so that's zorin os um i tried to approach this review in a different way not in my usual way where where i've looked at a system and i thought would i use it i think most of you know no i wouldn't use it it's not for me but it's not targeted at me i've been using linux for 17 years coming up 18 years and i have my own preferences regarding a linux system and and i prefer something a little bit more vanilla and plain that i can build up from scratch but i fully accept that the majority of ordinary computer users out there just want functionality and in terms of that i think zorin would be a great start in linux it would be a great start for linux users experienced linux users who prefer something that is simple and flexible and easy to get on with and they don't need to spend hours configuring it so i think there's a market there i think we have a lot to offer um new users coming over and i think zorin is one of those distros that's very much pitched at windows users and uh i can understand with windows 11 that the problems with people who have got perhaps older computers it's going to fill a niche there so all good very positive review so i'd just like to say as normal thanks for watching the video please subscribe if you enjoy the videos i have noticed that an awful lot of my viewers aren't subscribed really helps you know helps the older youtuber algorithms if you're actually subscribed and of course you'll get to be notified of videos when they arise and if you'd like to support the channel well you can do that on patreon.com forward slash old tech bloke or go to my website and just buy me a pint it would be very much appreciated either way i'd just like to finish off by thanking my existing patrons and they are of course robert aristotelis storm picks mike ty forrest patrick glenn magnus darren misslav and chris thanks very much guys and chris the latest patreon thanks for your support mate and i'll see you all next week

Channel: OldTechBloke

Views: 4,037

Rating: 4.9344263 out of 5

Keywords: oldtechbloke, otb, linux, oldtechbloke youtube, old tech bloke youtube, zorin os 16, zoring linux for windows users, windows alternative, moving to linux, migrating to linux, zorin os 16 pro, zorin os 16 core, zorin os install, zorin os demo, zorin, best distro for new users, best linux for new users, beautiful linux distribution, zorin os 16 review, zorin review, zorin 16 review, brilliant distro for all users, linux for new users, zorin os 16 new features, best linux distro

Id: Av5u-rkGUX0

Length: 31min 41sec (1901 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 06 2021