just installed zorin 10, ending 17 year relationship with MS

Hi all. I have a HP Pavilion dv7, dual core AMD with 6 gb of RAM and 512mb vid card.

Was running Windows 7 and pretty happy with it, although the computer ran out of memory at times even with 5.5 gb available (another 512 going to video).

One day last week I decide to do a factory restore to speed things up a bit, darn thing overheats in the middle and I crash. Try to boot back up, no OS.

Most people would freak right? Naw, I been using computers 17 years son. Unless there's flames shooting out of it in front of me, I'm pretty much cool as a cucumber.

Anyways, I go on another PC and start looking up linux alternatives. Tried Ubuntu, blah. Googled "similar to windows" got Zorin.

Installed Zorin 10 Core. Love it. Have to google every other thing it seems but I'll be patient with the windows > linux learning curve.

Only gripes: the clock's messed up. I thought it would be brilliant to remove the relatively useless battery icon from systray but that seemed to mess up the clock. Now part of it is cut off on the right. It won't show "AM/PM" and sometimes cuts off the final number at the end if it's 4 digits.

When I tried changing date/time settings to add the day, thinking "that's handy" and "maybe that'll fix it" it simply added the date and most of it was cut off. I couldn't see much past a few letters. Not sure what's up, there seemed to be a GUI element on the right that's obfuscating it but clicking/right-clicking doesn't do anything to it.

Second gripe: sometimes menu items are unresponsive. The other day I tried right clicking on Skype 4.3 in the systray to "quit" and it wouldn't!! It did nothing, I might as well have been clicking air. Same thing just now with date/time settings again. I tried to pull it up to explain better and I clicked 3 times. Nothing.

I don't know what this is about but none of those are major enough for me to stop using this. Overall very happy, and thank you.

Hi, I would remove Zorin 10 as it is end of life 31st this month. I would drop back to Zorin 9 which is LTS (Long Term Support) until April 2019.

I appreciate that, thank you. Honestly that's kinda crummy. I did try googling to see whether I should get 9 or 10, and I couldn't find anything. I chose 10 because logically that would be the newer and longer-supported version.

They should make things like that clearer on the zorin website? :\ It was most certainly not or I would have gotten 9 to begin with.

Is there a way to downgrade without losing my installed software and the configurations I've done? That was a bit of doing! lol. But I'll do a fresh install if I have to.

Overall I can hardly complain. This is an amazing OS and the windows-like style is making the learning curve so much more comfortable.

To update on my previous issues: the clock is fine now. Apparently that area is the shutdown icon, which wasn't showing up for some reason before.

I've also figured out that menu items can be specific - like if there's an X that's what you click, not the menu item itself.

I've noticed a minor issue - right click context menus don't take screen resolution into consideration like Windows will. For example, I'll right click something on Skype and the menu goes down past the screen when on Windows it would simply display it upwards instead of downwards ya know?

But honestly it's great and I'm very happy. :) So now about that downgrade?

OK, First off, to be fair to Zorin they do make it quite clear about difference between 9 and 10:

Well guess since they released 11 Beta they have taken the old page down that showed 9 - Long Term Support, 10, Short/Limited release - they had the two de facto wallpapers from each with that wording!

Anyways, first off I would backup your '/home' folder - when doing this, make sure you press 'Ctrl+ H' to show the hidden files - this is where all your Application settings are stored, together with the false 'C:\' drive if you have any Windows applications installed under WINE.

As for what to do with the rest, I would see if the same advice Wolfman gave for 'upgrading' in his excellent Post Install Guide might be of assistance? It is basically installing a new system anyway?

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=9785 - go to the section on 'upgrading' - sadly no hyperlinks!

If you want to make an image of your current installation, then you could also do this before you start 'playing' with your current setup by downloading 'redobackup' another great free utility, based on Ubuntu:

http://redobackup.org.

Take Care!

If that's true then I missed the info. :)

Appreciate the advice, thank you.

Follow up: Now on Zorin 9 Educational version, was curious about the bundled software.

Very happy with the decision, and this is more stable than 10. Thumbs up, no complaints.

Glad you got sorted friend.