• BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Zorin has laudable aims but it’s delivered in a flawed way. It’s essentially Gnome with extensions to make it look and feel like other GUIs. Problem is, Gnome is not a good base for this type of approach - it is fundamentally not flexible and not designed for this. So Zorin is basically deliberating breaking Gnome to make it into something it’s just not meant to be under the hood.

    Zorin looks very nice graphically and seems good at at first but then niggles come along. Minor but constantly present.

    I think it’s probably OK for a Linux newbie but not ideal long term and doesn’t have the user base to make it as easy to get support as Mint for example.

    If you do want to mimick other GUIs then really don’t start with Gnome. You can achieve much better results using KDE on any distro; KDE by design is flexible and it doesnt require breaking fundamental design decisions made for Gnome to mimick something else. Only downside to do-it-yourself with KDE is if you do want to perfectly mimick another GUI then it is a manual process of finding themes and skins that match the aesthetic you want.

    That’s becuase Linux is it’s own thing and not focused on trying to mimick other DEs (even if some GUis have superifical similarities to Windows or MacOS).

    I get what Zorin is trying to do, but I think using Gnome is a mistake but also for me the basic idea of “familiar to ease you in” doesn’t really work. Better for people to learn how Linux is different - there is a choice in design philosophies but all of them are shaped around what Linux is and how it works rather than what Windows or MacOS are.

    • AmanitaCaesarea@slrpnk.net
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      2 days ago

      Familiarity is very important for onboarding users. You’d be surprised how easy people give up because something is different. Kde Plasma is great, I run it myself, but information overload and flexibility is more likely to deter the average pc user than to win them over.