Zorin is ubuntu based, which is convenient, for a few reasons, and annoying for a few other ones. I’m not a huge fan of snaps, and I’m not a huge fan of not being able to just edit my resolv.conf at will.
I am a huge fan of PPAs though.
add-apt-repository is a lot of what I like about ubuntu based distros. Plenty of things are not packaged in the normal repositories and have quick and easy copypaste instructions in their READMEs for adding their PPA. Very nice.
Zorin also is just pretty. I like their zorin appearance tool to customize their gnome themes. Here’s how zorin looks:
Imagine that background was dark theme. That’s a nice dracula esque setup if it wasn’t for that horrifically bright background.
the background makes more sense for their default theme ( its a light theme ) :
The easy customization with zorin appearance to get it to a dark theme with whatever accent you want is really nice though.
It’s also really nice that zorin supports windows executables out of the box via wine. This does not mean all windows apps will work perfectly, but some actually do. Notepad++ for example, I ran in wine, and ran into 0 problems.
Whenever I recommend a person I know in real life to try linux, I have them use Zorin.
Zorin does NOT update though, for a LONG time. The release cycle is a WHILE.