~~BEST~~ most strongly marketed
I'm willing to assume Zorin is a solid distro, and I suppose some Windows expats might enjoy a Gtk-based desktop, but experience has shown that some are more at home with KDE Plasma.
this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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I think most users wouldn't care about qt vs GTK.
I will say- zorin is solid. It's very, very close to that windows look and feel which would make that transition easier. I think that, KDE Debian, mint, fedora (to some extent) are all great transition distros. But zorin absolutely mimics the feel of windows the best (not my cup of tea personally but I'm not the target demo.)
Zorin has modified the GNOME back end so the UI looks more like a KDE layout. You get 4 options for the layout (iirc). So its Windows like, but smooth and polished. It's a really good choice for people transitioning from Windows.
if it is its a big change. I would say last year little to no people knew about it. That being said that title is bs for such a subjective thing. I use it but always mention in what ways its good but that is not going to fit everybody.
I love KDE plasma, but I find that it has way too many customizations. I like Gnome's approach of simplicity and integrating everything well. I just don't like their default desktop paradigm. They tried to do something different and too simple and it pushed a lot of people away or required heavy customizations line Zorin did. Zorin desktop is what Gnome should've been.
The PR machine is really pumping out all these Zorin videos and articles this week...
Isn’t that the point?
So what? It's Linux. More Linux users are good for the ecosystem. I'd rather have people's feed flooded with zorin videos that a single windows or Mac video
Why is it better than bazzite? Why is it better than fedora?
Bazzite is one of my favorites but it's definitely got some faults. It doesn't support anything but Flatpaks (lots of apps are .deb only or maybe .rpm). It's immutable. And it's strongly gaming-focused. Which is just not what everyone needs.
Zorin has a really cool feature that identifies the app you're trying to run and advises you what's the best way to do it.
With bazzite or really any distro you can run distrobox/distroshelf and just install whatever kind of package you want, for example I have an arch box where I run darktable because the flatpak kept giving me not responding prompts whenever I scrolled through my library too fast.
also I had trouble getting opencl to run with my igpu on flatpak, but with distrobox I just installed the GPU drivers and everything ran right away, and darktable shows up like any other application in the menus
you can run distrobox/distroshelf
That's comes with a whole slew of problems of its own.
It's great, but it's too complicated for people who are not as technologically literate as us.
They seem to very much focus on a smooth UX for people trying Linux for the first time. It seems to be made idiot proof, so it won't frustrate new users and would meet all the needs of the vast majority of users
It's just GNOME with a different theme by default...
Exactly, its smooth and integrated but looks like Windows style menus and task bar.
It's GNOME with a lot of hand holding and guidance, which is what your average user is used to and wants. Most people here aren't the target audience for Zorin as we probably already run Linux
I briefly considered Zorin and Bazzite on my journey from Mint. I dropped Zorin I think because I was looking for something that was on a newer kennel to support my new graphics card.
Bazzite I dropped because I think it looked like it was all snaps.
Running Fedora now. It's a far stretch from the Red Hat I played with 20 years ago. I think after running Mint for so long,
Bazzite doesn't even support Snaps...
Hmm, you are right. I was thinking of flatpak. I had made it a habit to avoid those formats way back in my slashdot days and never revisited it.
Flatpak is more or less the default option now.
Yeah, it's pretty common with Fedora too I think. I didn't even investigate and ended up making the final decision by gut. I was more interest in running an older established flavor than trying something new.
Its a solid choice. If I wasn't such a Tumbleweed fan, I would use Zorin