Looking for opinions about Zorin OS for upcoming review

Hello all. I run a linux review site called 'Linux In Review' that covers distros and apps with written and YouTube video. I am planning a review of Zorin OS 5 in the near future. Before I do reviews, I reach out to the community and ask what they think I should include. So, what do you think makes Zorin OS 5 a great distro, what makes it stand out from the crowd, what features should I focus on in my review?

If you would like to check out my other reviews http://i2productions.com/lir

I'm already planning a review of Ultimate Edition, I'm just waiting for 3.0. I had 2.9 on my wifes laptop for a while. I think its a pretty good distro. But thats irrelevant, you pretty much gave me the rundown i was planning on for my review. I should just publish my hardware specs in ny faqs section. I get your point, but I don't like spending half my review pimping my hardware specs like half the reviewers I see out there.

I am still not going to clutter my reviews with machine specs, but I have added the specs of my review machine to the FAQ section of the page. I have to wonder why when I ask for opinions on Zorin OS 5, you point me more towards Ultimate Edition. I am planning on reviewing it when they reach 3.0. The Zorin OS review will be out later this week. Any further opinions are welcome!

Yea, ultimate edition is nothing more than just ubuntu with more software installed, that is readily available for any ubuntu distribution. Zorin 5 at least has a uniqueness to it by adding the look changer and background plus that others just simply does not have.. I am happy with Zorin and definitely will be staying with it for a while, I have used many others but Zorin just seems to make everything more simple in the long run and that is what I have been looking for all these years out of Linux.

Thanks for the clarification. After playing with it for a few weeks now, I'm really not sure how I feel about Zorin OS 5. I thought I knew exactly how I was going to review it, but I'm starting to feel a little different about it. I'm going to put it to the wife test. My wife has been a Windows user forever, and does a lot of document work, for her job. I gave her Ultimate Edition 2.9 on her laptop a few months ago, and other than some of the cool themes, she was very overwhelmed. There was too much software for her. When I was doing my review on Ubuntu 11.04, she saw the Unity Desktop and fell in love. She's been using it as her primary OS for about a month now. (Yeah, I really don't know why she likes Unity, when not a single other person I've talked to enjoys it.) I'm going to present her with Zorin OS 5, and see what a slightly less tainted opinion on the matter gets me. Since it's really seems to be just what the description says about being a step that makes Windows users comfortable with Linux.

Hi everyone.

I think it would be good to show viewers what the different desktop "looks" are like, especially win7 and mac OSX. I say this because it would show people unrelated to the project how Zorin can be just like whatever it is they're using right now, as well as pointing out where there's room for improvement. Another thing worth looking into is Background plus, which basically lets you easily set your wall paper to an animation. I think these two things should definetely be included in any review of the non core versions of zorin, and maybe weighing in on whether it's worth donating to get the more specialized versions.

Those sound like some cool features. You say they are only included in the non-free version though? Unless the Zorin project wants to donate a copy of the payed version for review purposes, I will unfortunately only be covering the Core system.

Well, the look changer is in the core version, but my understanding is that the macOS look is only available in the paid versions, as well as a few other looks. As for Zorin background plus, you can get an idea of what it looks with this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Coiae3Erhjk&feature=player_embedded

I've seen videos of people using something similar on their computers (namely green characters moving on a black background matrix style) but this seems to be an easier and more flexible way of going about it.

At any rate, if you're going to try the core version you should probably consider looking into the live session ( I personally found it faster than fedora 15 and the enlightment version of the latest pclinuxOS)

As a final note, I'd like to point out that there are some relatively important weaknesses to ZorinOS, even if they are understandable and the developers aren't at fault. The most important one, to me, would be that at some point the user will have to leave his or her comfort zone to stay up to date. for instance, the repos are not updated. The same goes for upgrades, as they are tied to Ubuntu and thus a wrong click could potentially ruin your machine (as evidenced by the warning not to upgrade zorin 4 to Ubuntu 11.04). These two things could be solved in the future by the dev team if they ever manage to create their own upgrade path and it might even represent a chance to monetize the OS further, but I don't see that happening in the near future.

Thanks for the useful tips. I will definitely be mentioning this stuff in my review. I am planning on reviewing it in a live session. I have installed it, but I did find it to actually run smoother from the live boot. I should have the review done early next week!

These are all wonderful points. I'll be putting together the Zorin OS review, and will hopefully have it posted tommorow. I saw the Lite release on distrowatch. I will check it out, and maybe include a brief blurb in the review about it.

I check out Mint LXDE 11 RC 2 today, and was not impressed. I've been a gnome Mint user for about a year now, and I've got to say I'm not impressed for a second RC release. In my view, it's far from RC material!

They're not moving entirely to Debian...It took so long to get the stock Mint 11 out because they had to de-Natty-fi it. Only Mint Debian and Mint XFCE are Debian based. Mint LXDE is based on Lubuntu 11.04.

Ok, took me a while to get to this one, but he review is finally out and published at http://i2productions.com/lir/?p=236!

@swarfendor437 It was something talked about for Mint, but so far the fate of Mint 12 is actually kind of in limbo at the moment. I don't even think Clem(the head of the mint team) knows where it will go from here. Because almost nobody wants Unity, and if Ubuntu keeps filling the libs with useless code, it's not imposible to think that we may see the project go all Debian in the future!

No even after opening from the bar, it still does nothing. It's not a huge deal, but it should either work or not be in the menu. Didn't matter whether or not it was live or installed.

Just my 2 cents worth here, but I highly recommend and suggest installing hardinfo via sudo apt-get install hardinfo and then run it. Afterwards, hit the "Geenrate Report" button and it will output to an HTML file by default, but you can choose to save it as a text file (TXT) instead.

This is probably one of the best ways to get ALL of the info to the devs - short of tar.gzipping up /var/log and FTPing it to them