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Zorin 12.4 Lite Feedback

Aravisian

Sat Jun 15, 2019 9:29:31 pm

I bought a Panasonic Toughbook because it was dirt cheap, as it is quite old. The purpose being, I am a shop guy. I restore and work on Classic Cars and do a lot of machining and tooling. Lots of dust, though I take steps to reduce it. Having access to information helps a great deal, a Notebook is most convenient but in that rougher environment, a Notebook is at higher risk. The downside of the well-over 15 year old age of the thing (It shipped without any OS installed) is that it cannot handle much of newer O.S.'s as well as that it was designed for a lightweight O.S. even when it was new.
I admit, I decided to move away from Zorin on this one. I figured Zorin would be too heavy for it.
I messaged some folks and asked for pointers and tips and recommendations on a Distro to put on it. I then tested quite a few on my main machine using VirtualBox and LiveCD. Narrowed my choices down to MXLinux (Midweight but very good), Solyd9, Lubuntu and Peppermint. I chose MXLinux and it worked well, but was too heavy, still. So, I tried several other distros where I ran into issues like conflicts, programs not opening or operating correctly. Several were installing with errors. THings got pretty messy with them all. I started thinking; "Is there a Lightweight Zorin?" After-all, I use Zorin now, am registered on a Forum and am familiar with how it works, generally.
Looked it up, found the XFCE Zorin 12.4 Lite and installed it on the Toughbook without bothering to test it. (I was tired, it was late...)
Installed perfectly with no errors. Every program ran perfectly with no troubleshooting required. Even something as simple as installing custom Cursors, which is notorious with XFCE, worked on each cursor with no problems. Zorin 12.4 Lite was the ONLY XFCE distro I tried that did that. The rest might install one, maybe two and even then, partially functional. Zorin 12.4 lite gobbled up four of them with all four functioning fully. (XFCE has a file permissions issue with Custom Cursors, unfixed after ten years. You must manually go in and change the permissions and even then, it's 50/50 hit or miss whether they will work.)
But the most telling thing is that on each, I installed conky with a conky to monitor CPU usage. All the distros maxed out the CPU at 100% under a load, even when some of them still worked reasonably fast and smoothly.
Zorin 12.4 Lite doesn't. On occasions, it hits 100% for a moment, but quickly goes back down. Where all the others showed a solid block of max CPU usage, Zorin shows a series of spikes.
It operates faster than the almost all of the ones listed on a Google search as the fastest, with only AntiX (A systemd free distro) holding the lead. AntiX is still the fastest lightweight distro, but Zorin 12.4 Lite is hot on its heels boasting far more versatility, functionality, customization as well as the ability to handle heavier loads.
Having literally spent this past week testing Lightweight distro's, I cannot express how impressive Zorin Lite is. The rest operated reasonably within the same range but Zorin stands in a league of its own. The difference between it and the rest is huge. I did not expect it.

Oh, and I should point out, this Toughbook uses an SSD hard drive, not HDD. Rock on Zorin Team.

Swarfendor437

Sun Jun 16, 2019 12:18:44 pm

Nice post. ;) :D

jcartner-young

Sat Aug 03, 2019 2:23:58 pm

Have we got a way of updating Zorin, so we don't have to spend all day upgrading, migrating and reconfiguring?

I'd just installed 12.4 as 9 stopped getting recent software updates (and I need TeamViewer for work!) when 15 came out (Didn't see 13 or 14, though). I just don't want to have to start all over again with Zorin 15 :/

BTW, I have had no end of issues with 'Software' spinning at me all day - Usually, it'll show me the front page, but searches and other sections return nothing but a spinner - and these new and buggy 'SNAP' applications only working at less than 100% functionally. Also, they don't obey the window manager snapping, menu layout or desktop themes. :(

[screenshot upload not available] (The screenshot mechanism also removes context/pop-up menus from the screen - Not useful!)

Can we choose to exclude non-apt/deb 'SNAP' packages from 'Software'?

Also, can we have a feedback mechanism within Zorin? - I hate these kind of forum sites lol - I find them disorganised and confusing, not well suited to support.

Is there anywhere I can simply report all my issues with screenshots?

mdiemer

Sat Aug 03, 2019 5:01:31 pm

Glad you got Lite up and running on that machine. Just to let you know (and anyone else interested) a really good light distro is Watt OS. It is extremely lightweight, yet has a nice GUI, with LXDE desktop. I have the 32 bit version on a 10 year old hard drive that is rated Red by Crystal Disk, which means imminent failure. but it has gone on like that for years now. I've had BSD on it, as well as solus and Linux Light. now I think I have found one that is perfect for it. I did it just to have another disk with Linux, as an emergency tool. But I am very impressed with Watt. They will be releasing version 11 soon. I would have tried Zorin lite if I had known it was out. I'll probably check it out anyway.

Swarfendor437

Sat Aug 03, 2019 5:59:38 pm

jcartner-young wrote:Have we got a way of updating Zorin, so we don't have to spend all day upgrading, migrating and reconfiguring?

I'd just installed 12.4 as 9 stopped getting recent software updates (and I need TeamViewer for work!) when 15 came out (Didn't see 13 or 14, though). I just don't want to have to start all over again with Zorin 15 :/

BTW, I have had no end of issues with 'Software' spinning at me all day - Usually, it'll show me the front page, but searches and other sections return nothing but a spinner - and these new and buggy 'SNAP' applications only working at less than 100% functionally. Also, they don't obey the window manager snapping, menu layout or desktop themes. :(

[screenshot upload not available] (The screenshot mechanism also removes context/pop-up menus from the screen - Not useful!)

Can we choose to exclude non-apt/deb 'SNAP' packages from 'Software'?

Also, can we have a feedback mechanism within Zorin? - I hate these kind of forum sites lol - I find them disorganised and confusing, not well suited to support.

Is there anywhere I can simply report all my issues with screenshots?


Hi, first off can you either read online or download my unofficial manual for 12.2 [https://app.box.com/s/71wn2fird2nee6un8t206ugm6mzui9hr] - (it will still apply to 12.4 - I never got round to changing it to Unofficial Manual 12.x) - what you are missing is Synaptic Package Manager. If you have issues that require resolving, please post in Help and Support. If you just want to give feedback, post in the 'Feedback' section of the forum and if you have major concerns which I or others can't answer regarding your feedback then please let us know and our advice would be to copy the link location of your thread into a PM to AZorin. ;) :D