Zorin OS 17 The Long Awaited Update

hey guys what's going on it's Don here from Nova Spirit Tech and welcome back to the channel and today we're going to be checking out Zoran OS 17 the long awaited update so let's get started now zor OS 17 is a Linux operating system based off upun 22204 now what has my attention on this operating system is the design feature the design of the desktop is supposed to be very similar to a Windows operating system so it's less of a learning curve when you're moving from Windows to Linux now when I have friends who are just planning to move over to Linux this is an operating system that I advise them to use just because it's one less thing they have to learn so instead of having to learn the operating system and the desktop itself they already know how to navigate around the desktop using zorin they just have to learn the Linux operating system itself and then eventually when they get good at it they can move on to another operating system if they want but yes zorin OS is a very friendly operating system if you are planning to switch from Windows to Linux what's best is that you can actually actually installed this on really old hardware and it should work just fine the long awaited update part is uh zor OS 16 which is the previous version of this was still based off Ubuntu 20.04 which means it's quite outdated as far as Hardware goes kernel wise everything along that way so I kind of stopped telling people to switch over to Zoran maybe a year or two ago because it was outdated with that being said uh now they finally updated to 2204 which means we're going to get a 6.2 kernel we're going to get more Hardware support it's more up to date when you software all the bells and whistles with new updates that come along the way now being that we are in 2024 now and 24.0 for might be coming out in a few months technically it's already outdated that's what my thoughts are but anyway let's check out the desktop now here we have theor OS as a default I did add a few things to it myself just to test it out but we're going to go through all that stuff this is a fresh boot so we're going to go over to system monitor and you're going to see it uses about 1.5 gigs of RAM out of my 16 gigs of RAM RAM and I am using a Mini PC for this which has a n95 16 gigs of RAM and 1 TB storage otherwise um it is using 1.5 gigs of RAM which is to be honest in today's standard that's not a lot but if you have a very old PC uh and that only has 4 gigs of RAM that is a lot considering but I don't know how much less it would take if you install this on a smaller machine now the desktop itself prize itself on this start menu to look very similar to Windows 10 which honestly it does now zor appearance allows you to change a lot of the features of this start menu so I could actually change it to the way I actually like it which actually expands the name on the taskbar versus just icons itself so I I kind of like it this way they also have a full application menu uh similar to what you would find in the Mac they also have this version where you could actually get a dock and a few other things that you can do so let me see if I want more desktop layouts I do have to upgrade to Pro and they do have that option but I am using zor 17 core so I'm going to switch back over to uh this one right over here which is the stock we have different types of themes that you can change to so they do have dark mode over here and they do have accent color so I'm going to click on files and you'll see this is blue right now if I switch over to Green the icons will be green orange everything will be orange I'm going to leave it to blue and then we have a few effects that I did enable so right now if I move Windows like this it just looks standard but if I turn on Jelly mode or in Linux version we would call it wobbly Windows uh you have this wobbling mode and because they have the desktop Cube now if you hit alt tab it's 3D which this has actually been in Linux for like a very long time if you hit Windows key it'll actually shrink down to like some sort of window like this and it's kind of like 3D so let's switch back over to that desktop as far as the interface goes you have your tar button so you can move it to the left if you're familiar with with uh Mac OS or you can move it to the right tiling Windows you have to enable this it doesn't come default enable but you do have to enable this for advanced tiling windows and I do have a gripe about this I am going to show you actually so right now I have file manager open right and I am going to open another one so I'm going to open new window and if I was to tile this to the left then I'm going to select this tile this to the right you can see I have the two tiling Windows I'm going to close this out and then close this out and then if I open the window again it keeps its default like that size windows it might just be a thing that I'm used to in Windows where it restores the previous size of the window but this will actually keep it on that last time you closed it which is tiled um one of the things that I didn't like when I was testing this out on other resolutions uh it did have some overlapping issues as well so file browsers were overlapping on another but it doesn't seem to happen on 1080 moving along we have icons that we could put on our desktop so so if you're familiar with the recycling bin or network manager or home folders it's there or and then you could also change fonts over here now I got to say one thing another thing about this I'm not a huge fan of their dark mode all right so I'm going to switch over to their dark mode and I don't know what it is I just don't I'm not a huge fan of the colors on this right now and if I was to switch the effects over I mean the themes over to like a green it actually changes the background color also like if I have orange you could see the background color is orange as well I'm not a huge fan of this color I don't know what it is so even though they do have dark mode personally I I don't like the accent color that it's um on the uh windows with otherwise yeah it does work now I'm going to keep it in dark mode for now and we'll just keep browsing along the line now since I am using zor and core there is not much applications that are pre-installed we do have the standard stuff like weather clocks appointments games I did install Steam so we're going to check that out in a second Graphics they only have regular image viewer and photos uh office- wise they have libbre office uh internet they do have Firefox installed and remina system tools is their standard system tools that you would see upgrades or in OS uh Power statistics stuff like that and then your utilities where we have our standard um set of utilities for Gnome basically and if you can't tell already this is pretty much based off gnome now another thing that they added was this little feature over here which isn't gnome thing but they added their own little twist to it which makes it look a little bit better you can actually select your sound output as you want over here as well so right now I do have it I think on HDMI so I'm just going to leave it like that and let's head over to settings now much has Chang over here so if you're familiar with gnome or any other Ubuntu dros this looks similarly the same you can go in here and change some settings as far as like key bindings and a few other stuff Bluetooth um sound power if you want to change some display or your resolution you can change it over here I'm going to head over to about and it shows my device name uh processor is the n95 1 TB hard drive capacity and it is using Wayland actually I did not know that it is using Wayland which is pretty interesting I wonder how Nvidia is going to work with this since it's Wayland And Nvidia and Wayland is not like fully fully supported yet but yeah otherwise that's the settings itself uh we're going to pop over to Firefox right now and we are going to well this is exactly what I was on the last page so it advises that zor os7 has arrived it kind of gives you the idea of what it is and uh going down the page what's new smoother performance which it does say oh look it does say 1 and A2 gigs of RAM which was 1.5 when we first start out universal search and improvements so we do have that menu search right over here our menu is different because we could change that around but uh you can search for stuff over here so let's look for steam there you go look at that it pulls up steam uh what else do we got going on over here multitasking red find which is our thing that we were just testing I don't have a touchpad right now to test your finger gestures but that's how it would generally look like we do have different menus which I showed you before we also have this which is their 3D cube or if you're familiar with um we used to call this compas and you can install the 3D uh Cube I'm talking about like back in 2006 or 7 alt tab switcher which we showed you just before couple of effects that I showed you enable animations jelly finin mode uh software actually let's go check out software store now in their software store they actually support three different things which is app Snap and flat pack which is not bad because they already have flat pack installed so if I'm looking for anything that's like flat pack say and I click on here it does have flat pack and I should have other options here see with package from app or from snap or flat pack and then I could just hit install to grab that advanced window tiling that I just showed you before which works but I didn't like the fact when you close it out it retains that window and then the key binding I was just explaining so yeah a lot of the steps uh that I kind of just looked into uh we didn't look into adjustable power needs so if you're familiar with Windows uh you already have this similar option so if I go over to let's say settings and I jump over to the power menu right over here we can choose the difference between Power Balance or power saver so if you're on laptops and stuff like that this helps a lot if especially if you wanted to go on power save or balance mode screenshot recording this is just the standard gnome uh new screenshot program that they have but yeah let's see if I can pull this up there you go print screen and there we have it we could actually record stuff too so if I want to snap just this I could just hit this little button and I'll grab that little sound effects and there we have it a PNG of the picture we just took redesign weather app again that's unknown weather let's check it out check out weather and New York did that not work okay that seem to not work at all so I'm going to close that out two desktop layouts only for pro and uh we did see this one where we were able to put the menu up on top but we didn't have the dock better Hardware support oh here's the thing about gnome and I've talked about this before in a previous video the newer gnome has a feature to support RDP out of the box so if I head over to settings head over to sharing I could actually enable this and turn on remote desktop and instead of the default protocol being VNC we actually get a remote protocol as RDP so if you do want to test out Linux or you want to test out this operating system you can install it in a virtual environment and just RDP to it which is much easier than setting up VNC and trying to get that up and going so yeah that's one of the good features I like about gnome on the latest releases so back to the operating system itself um now that we know that all this comes up I think that's about it long-term support up to 2027 the operating system itself still retains the whole familiar look that if you are coming off Windows you won't get lost because the start menu is there everything's there software packages settings everything so I do still like the fact that they didn't deviate from their original design and change it to something that we have to learn from scratch but instead they improved on it like adding tiling windows and stuff like that now as far as one of the features that they talk about in here right here the software store supports app Snap flat pack and a few other things app image Deb and windows software which is something I want to test out and I have not tried it out yet which what we're going to do right now uh I'm going to open up in files go into downloads and I did have a little program that I use sometimes which is already windows I have nothing installed as far as regarding Windows like wine or anything I don't so I'm going to double click this and see what happens and it says install Windows App Store to run levitator uh okay I'm going to install Windows app support and it's going to bring me to software Center and run Windows on zor OS with wine and play on Linux okay so it's a zor OS version of play on Linux to get Windows apps working I'm going to install this and see this application I'm installing is actually super simple to run basically what it does it normalizes audio so if you ever look into an app to normalize your audio you could just use levitator they do have a python version you could just install straight into Linux but I'm just trying to test out this um app support so I'm using the windows version okay there we go it seemed like it installed and it's running it right away just like a Windows app that is pretty cool play on Linux didn't pop up it just popped up with my installer program I'm going to hit next I'll accept again this does not take much to run so I'm just going to install it like I normally would on a Windows program next launch okay let's see what happens oh wow right away no errors nothing usually it would uh complain about com X something or Ms comom yeah whatever it's a dll that's usually missing but it it it actually installed it got everything up and running no complaints let me see if I could run this program where do I wine right over here levitator yeah starts right up and all I had to do was just double click it let me try again double click run anyway that's it wow very impressive I actually really like that that I could just double click on a program and it runs I don't have to like run wine or anything in the background to get it up and going all right that I approve definitely all right for now we're going to test out a game so let's close this out because I don't need that anymore and we're going to head right into Steam and since I've been running this for a while let me go check out my system monitor and my Ram is at 3 gigs well Firefox is still running so let's close out a Firefox and see how much that drops 2.6 500 megabytes then I'm running this so it's going to bring it back up all right here we go I only have one game installed which is risk of rain doesn't take much to run this game as a matter of fact actually I've been playing a lot of risk of rain recently with my son and it's been a lot of fun but I did put up um mango HUD so you guys could see the FPS and it's not going to do great because this is not a gaming machine itself St this Mini PC system to be running games but I had no problem installing this from ground up I was able to go to the software Center click on Steam download that log into my account download the game that I want and I had no problem adjusting anything that I want the only thing I had to add was mango HUD so you can see the FPS but that was about it I had no problems installing games on this and there we go game starts up perfectly fine I'm going to go over to single player audio sounds good have a lot of stuff unlocked already I'm just going to start this up it does have a little flickering going on right now which normally doesn't flicker game loads right away um my FPS is at 25 26 it's a little low for what I like to play this game on and basically if you never played this game it's very very fun it's a rogue type game where um every time when you kill something you earn a little B of money then you could open up these um what do you call these chests where it will unlock abilities or upgrades to your character and you just go around killing stuff and there's a lot of things to do but yeah it's a very fun game if you never got into it I put a lot of time into this trying to unlock stuff and I still don't have everything unlocked that's how much I play this game and it's still pretty good oh man I could just keep continuing this anyway it's not about this game itself but yeah I might play this on my gaming channel soon live because it's such a fun game and there's so many different builds that you can do with it anyway that is it for me I actually do enjoy using this operating system I was very intuitive I had no problems running it uh there was a couple of things here and there like I don't really like the th theme and as far as the windows tiling I think it could be improved on how when you close out the window restore back to original state but otherwise it's very user friendly um it could get you into Linux I really do like the windows thing where I was able to just double click on the exe and it'll install for me so a lot of things good going for it so if you guys are interested in this operating system I'll leave a link down in the description below if you guys are new to this channel consider subscribing and also hitting that Bell notification icon so you know when the next video is going to be out and I say my nerd cave hack till it hearts

Channel: Novaspirit Tech

Views: 8,152

Keywords: novaspirit, tech, zorin os 17, review, linux os, linux review, zorin os 17 review, zorin os, zorin, os

Id: ZS1Hs42UCes

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024