There has been alot of talk around winbus about ZorinOS as of late, and I got a little curious also. I’ve seen ZorinOS around distrowatch, and have even bounced to there website a few times. I never really gave it a second thought, and always figure its just another ubuntu re-spin ment to resemble windows for new users, which is cool just figured its not for me.

Because of all the talk on the bus, I decided to download the live dvd, and take it for a test drive. This is my honest opinion of ZorinOS …

When I booted up the live DVD I was surprised at how nice the single panel looked with DockBarX integrated, and gnomenu. I know its ment to somewhat resemble Window 7 or Vista but to me it didn’t so much that it was annoying. Actually it was done damn near perfect. I was glad to see wine already installed with the “good” stable version, and all the media codecs and needed extras were installed.  I installed both WinBus Messenger, and Y!Epic to play around and they both ran perfect, and quite fast. In fact I liked how well put together everything was, I have tried to use DockBarX, and gnomenu before but could never get em “tweaked” how I wanted them, and ZorinOS does it so damn nice, and the audio was amazing, everything just worked, that I decided to do a harddrive install. Now while on the live DVD I got a few errors which is sometimes normal when your running “live”, and it was kinda draggy live, but once I had it installed it was lightning fast. After 6 days still no problems and its all fast as hell. I did take the liberty to change up to a darker Equinox theme and install my favorite Faenza icons to make it my own, and I must say I’m really happy with the end results.

In short Id say yes for a new user ZorinOS is a very good choice, actually the best choice. For a long time linux user its a really good, get up and going distro. I am super lazy so I really like how everything is perfect and ready to go. I dont think it looks that much like windows , and thats a good thing, its just enough windowsy looking to make a noob feel less like the new kid in school. I like it, I would recommend it to anyone really. I even made a little ZorinOS / WinBus / Y!Epic tutorial for new users.