What level of faith do you require from people trying out the OS? What damage is done?

Zorin looks like a great starting-off point for normal (non-tech) people migrating from Windows. Visually it’s much more polished than Mint, based on Gnome and Ubuntu LTS.

Ubuntu LTS means it can also work in a corporate setting as it will get all the vendor support.

The Pro version is a bit of a bait-and-switch as I understand the only unique point is are the skins that give you Window 11 and MacOS look-alike themes. All the rest seems to be an open source software bundle. For Windows (or Mac) users the price isn’t really a negative and can be smart marketing.

For all of us used to the common Linux DE’s, dabble or dive into Arch, do heavy gaming? We aren’t the target audience. And that’s fine.

I know at least one person who has had a couple of false starts with migrating to Linux, is now on Zorin and thinks Zorin is much more polished looking than Mint.

If it lessens the impact of switching operating systems, and holds them in long enough to get comfortable with Linux, alternatively provides just enough Windows-like veneer to be comfortable enough then it is still a win.

Or perhaps dip their toes enough to look into distro-hopping.

Recompiling and replacing libraries was a thing back then - linux had it’s own flavor of ”DLL hell”. I broke a Debian install trying to get an IDE for Mono running by overriding and replacing quite a lot of shared libraries.

That being said I didn’t fully know what I was doing when I started off and the package manager kept warning me.

”You can’t trust free software”

As do I. I don’t really recall why I just stopped using it - it could just be because I didn’t feel ok feeding my personal finances into software controlled by a shady company.

I would avoid YNAB. They had an offline version years back that was really nice until they did a rug pull and disabled it in order to get people to buy their subscription service.

I agree, the article is in the uncanny valley where it just feels off. If it weren’t for AI slop, I would call it clickbait.

One solution is to replace the panel and dock with something like the Dash to Panel extension. It consolidates both into a single bar/dock/panel, is highly configurable and works very well. I wanted to get rid of the top panel for your reason as well as my muscle memory wanting the window controls of maximized windows to be on the top of my screen, not below a what essentially is a menu bar.

As with many of these questions, it depends and it’s subjective. In my case I have a machine running Endevour to tinker with and dip my toes into Arch. The philosophy is different where you need to think more about where your packages come from and be able to validate them (especially the AUR). It’s fun to tinker and better understand the underpinnings and on this machine I have very little that I rely on working so am OK with the increased level of jank.

For work I need a system that I can rely on working like it did yesterday and last week as well as having wide support from vendors. For me that means Ubuntu LTS. In many cases there are tools and applications that I really don’t care about how they work internally, just that they can be easily installed and work in-depth.

Bazzite is based on Fedora.