Zorin OS, test drive and experience.

After testing Elementary OS I though I would take a break from distro testing and concentrate on my next project, unfortunately my geek heart just can't stand still so I started to look for another test candidate, this time is Zorin OS to show what it can.

Tagged as 'One of the best Linux distros available' and 'Best replacement for both Windows and Mac' it sounded very promising so I downloaded the latest release, made a bootable USB stick and I was ready to test.

First impresion is a very clean, Gnome powered, friendly and for those coming straight from a windows enviroment, very familiar desktop which reminds a lot to Win xp or Win 7, alternative you have the normal Gnome desktop in the Core version and the Ultimate version offers a Mac and a Unity like desktop enviroments plus a few more goodies which are not included in the Core version.

The default Zorin OS desktop.

Under the hood is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which means stability, long time support and  5 year updates.

The out of the box applications include libre office, chromium, gimp and a preinstalled wine (which unfortunately didn't work for me, more on this soon)
A big plus from Zorin was setting up my printer. I have a HP multi-function device connected to our home network via wlan, Zorin found it within seconds and in less than 2 minutes i was all set, it was even easier than setting it up on windows!
Unfortunately there are also minus points, libre office kept crashing while I did some light office work and if i had more than 5-6 programs open at the same time i noticed some lag in the overall performance, probably updating will solve the problem(s)
In a nutshell, ZorinOS is a good looking, stable and fast Linux operating system which is worth a try.