On 2025-11-26 15:33, William Park via Talk wrote:
Anyone running Zorin OS or Linux Mint on real machine? Any issues? [snip] - they crash about the same number of times (but, I think it's VirtualBox issue). - speed is about the same - they're based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (kernel 6.14). - Zorin has its own desktop... it's okay. - Mint has its own desktop, too... it's okay, too.
I switched to Linux Mint after Ubuntu changed to Unity (if I remember the name right) for their desktop. It lasted less than a half-hour on my machine. I think Mint is based on a version of Ubuntu. One of the ideas behind the distro seems to one of stability. It is usually lagging when it comes to the versions of available packages. Might not be an issue for you but it was for me when I was part of the GIMP developer community and the core devs seemed to be mostly using Debian testing. They would often bump required packages to ones not available to Mint forcing me to build the dependencies from source. Mint is available in several varieties. Its own desktop is Cinnamon. I haven't used it. I use Mint with the MATE desktop. MATE was based on Gnome 2 which has been the desktop I have used for many a year. It does what I need. Mint is also available in their Debian Edition version. Mint is pretty stable. On rare occasions a program has triggered a bug in the desktop making it run at 100% CPU. Sometimes locking the desktop requiring it to be killed from a command line. I haven't had a full desktop lockup for a few years now, IIRC. I might have had the 100% desktop load issue more recently but it is rare. It is pretty good at handling in place upgrades vs forcing you to do fresh installs. I generally haven't had a problem going from release to release. I suggest you don't skip any if you do an in place upgrade. Make sure you backup your root partition first, just in case. You may find that you have lost a feature or two after an upgrade. I miss the slideshow feature that used to be on the login window. Another feature that was lost some years ago is the ability to skip installing a boot loader. I have grub configured the way I want and installation of a boot loader often results in it messing up the menu entries so I always keep a back up of the grub.cfg file. I could make comments about how Linux distros have gone down hill to a degree over the past few decades but that's a topic for another time. I'm currently trying out Debian Testing and Devuan on a laptop as I'm considering whether to switch to the first one for more up to date packages, or to the second to get away from systemd. I know nothing of Zorin. Too many distros to keep track of these days. I rarely look at the distrowatch site. I don't know how you use your computer so I don't know what else to say that might be useful to you. If you have specific questions just ask and I will answer if I can. -- Cheers! Kevin. https://www.patreon.com/KevinCozens | "Nerds make the shiny things that | distract the mouth-breathers, and Owner of Elecraft K2 #2172 | that's why we're powerful" #include <disclaimer/favourite> | --Chris Hardwick