I cant say what my favorite is. Certainly Linux Mint is in the lead. But, I can tell you worst: Zorin OS. Clobbered my windows installation, for one. For another, they charge $39 to help you install it and then do absolutely nothing. And they are now starting to claim that open source means they are free to do what ever they want which includes selling it. Bad distro and bad company.
I have had Zorin OS basic installed on my mother-in-lawâs computer for 4 or 5 years now and she loves it AND I didnât pay a dime.
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I donât like Zorin either, but I donât blame them. IF Iâm right, they donât really sell their Linux, but they try to make a living on supporting it. Similar to what Red-Hat does? (Probably in different price range though 
)
You can get Zorin for free, if you need, you can get a paid support. I donât think this is bad at allâŚ
Am I wrong?
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Yes. I paid for support. I got an email saying they had gotten my payment and to wait for a registration code. You need that code to get help. I sent them help request saying I never got response 24 hrs later with request for help.
No answer. I even stated I had purchased ultimate. So with no response 3 - 4 days later, I filed a dispute with my CC. They refused refund. The same day of them telling my CC company to go blow, which was 10 days after, they sent me an email saying âsorry for late responseâ but there is no key. The form on their site requires a key to get support. So this fake support. And the fact that it was same day and around same time suggests their response is CYA to let the keep the $39 fee.
Now, Iâm out 39 bucks. But its worst. To add insult to injury after successful installing Linux Mint with no problem on my tablet, I thought let me give their Zorin FREE education version a try.
I followed instructions to do side by side install, very similar to Linux Mint which had worked on my tablet fine. Zorin OS corrupted my Window 7 installation. (Linux Mint did not, btw.)
After Zorin OS, I could not access any Windows 7 at all. I could do no repair as it never saw the 2nd partition. And neither did boot up show 2nd partition. But it was there as Zorin was only using space I gave it.
Had to spent $80 for recovery disk to get my data back. Had to spend another $30 for Windows 7. I did get my data back using recovery disk. But for whatever reason my wifi no longer works, even after format and virgin install the way it did before Zorin OS. In particular I have no WiFi or BT. And I have no idea what else itâs done. So, Zorin has done other damage that has survived past a fresh windows 7 install. And now I am out the $39, $80, $30 and my favorite ASUS is not 100%.
If Zorin was an honest, reputable company instead of saying âsorry for late response,â they would have refunded money to CC company. The fact their email to me and response to CC says they understood fully.
All I can say is stay away from Zorin OS, unless you are too stupid (or sucker) to learn from someone elseâs problem with them. And they are counting on it. They are thinking they can just take $39 and do nothing for any sucker too stupid to fall for their total lie.
Please feel free to refer others to this post. I would rather my experience helps someone than to think I have lost $150, plus a perfectly working $500 ASUS for nothing. Not to mention the hours of grief that continues as I try to figure out how to fix wifi/bt and whatever else I discover.
At this point, I am asking everyone on itsfoss community to help spread the word.
Donât mean to offend, but it seems as if you like to spend money, unnecessarily. All the things you mentioned that you have paid for donât have to be paid for. If you are as impulsive with your communicative behaviour as you seem to be with your spending behaviour, then maybe this isnât the whole storyâŚ
That said, I did not see any point against ZorinOS in your story telling. I only saw complaints about their support, etc. But no single point against ZorinOS (except the boot Windows boot not working thing, but I doubt it being related to the software, itself). Therefore I think youâre really unfair in the judgments you issue in your posts!
It would be fair to blame their obviously crappy âsupportâ. That is the only thing of all the things you mentioned that is actually bad, if it really occured exactly as you are telling it. Though, the support of a company releasing a product does not say anything about the product itself.
(Again, not intended to offend, just responding to what you said.)
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Impulsive in spending money? Thatâs quite a leap. I tried free tools to recover my windows 7 data. No avail. I was fortunate that I found the paid software did work.
As far as Windows 7, I did not have a key. I called my laptop manufacturer for it. I was told sorry MS no longer supports Win 7 and neither do they. They recommended I install Win 10. So, are there pirate keys for Win 7 that I could have gotten for free? Maybe. But, if you think not stealing is âwrecklessâ then you and I have a difference of opinion on that.
But I will say this much: I was indeed reckless in spending $39 with Zorin. I should have just gone with Linux Mint and I would have had none of these issues. And, I would also say that anyone else who does, is indeed wreckless in spending money when they can get perfectly good Linux Mint for free.
I expected this type of response. Maybe I should write a book about how getting a free Windows key is in no way âstealingâ. There are million reasons for that but I cannot explain them in one post and it would take too long.
Iâll try to make it short:
Microshit does not care if people pay for Windows. The fact that people are using Windows is a million times more worth than what you paid for your hilariously overpriced Windows 7. Not even Windows 10 is so expensive in the Lordâs year 2020. $30 for Windows 7 was on OK price 10 years ago.
That said, you did not need to pay for a recovery CD.
P.S.: Upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 10. Guess what, still free, because Windows begs everyone to use it. Nobody in Microshit cares if you pay for it. Literally nobody. They just have to officially care to maximize profits, but inofficially they stopped caring a long time ago.
P.P.S:
Maybe this example explains it best:
Imagine they have the choice between demanding a price for Windows 10 or giving it out for free.
If they give it for free, they get tons of telemetry and usage data for free from each user using Windows 10. But persisting on a price, they will lose users over that stubborness.
Now what is more profitable for a huge company like Microshit?
Getting the $30 for an OS they even dropped support for, entirely, or letting you ultimately use Windows 10 which provides them with tons of data about you yourself and about your daily OS usage?
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I decided to move this to a dedicated topic, as this conversation already started out being kind of off-topic in regards to the original thread.
I tried a recovery CD. It was not able to recover the corrupt Partition. Watched a number of youtube videos. Made several attempts. Tried a lot of options. Never worked. At that point it was call a professional who wanted $200+ to recover data or continue more research.
I tried several options of free tools to do repair. Called number of friends. And then found a review of 5 top recovery tools. All were try-before-you buy downloads. The only one that showed my files and partition was the one I bought.
As I said, I did not immediately go out and spend $80.
Lucky you. Did you do dual boot or just Zorin with Windows dual boot? In my case, it wasnt Zorin that failed, it was that the Zorin install corrupted the Win 7 in the process of setting up dual boot.
Where Iâll admit my foolishness was after having a perfectly good success with Linux Mint on my tablet, I even tried free Zorin OS.
If I had been wiser, I would have thought about it, I would have realized if they dont provide support after you pay for it, should I trust the reviews from others who were praising it (knowing their disclaimer they got free evaluation copy from Zorin OS).
If a company does one thing wrong, then itâs pretty good chance they will do other things wrong. Wrong not sending a support key was the start as they said they got my money and would send it.
And this has been followed by two wrongs. After 10 days of no support, reputable companies would have not said âsorryâ, they would have given refund, but instead they tell my CC company to go blow.
And so with these two wrongs, would it not stand to reason that they will put out poorly tested freeware? Maybe thatâs their whole game plan?
If someone, says they tried free and it blew their system, they say âAh, yes of course. That is why you should have bought installation support.â And to someone who buys support, they say âwe will send you registration to send request for supportâ and not do it. And, if someone asks for money back, they say go blow. Pretty logical strategy to bilk someone.
Stay away from Zorin OS.
I only have one thing to say to this thread. Always keep an offsite system image of Windows before doing anything with any Liniux OS. It has saved me from having to do a fresh Windows install and all my files. All it cost me was the time involved.
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Yes, I would agree with you. But more importantly make a backup of the all documents
the very day you do the work. I thought all critical documents/files had been backed up. But
when I checked the backup drive before I flashed the drive, I found this was not the case. Also, a very important thing is applications. You think you can always download them to get your system to what it was, but that is not true.
The only smart think I did was check the backup drive before I flashed the drive to do new
Windows install. I seriously doubt any thing at all would have been recoverable had I done a flash in order to do virgin install. It was then I realized I needed to do recovery and not just restore old from my backup system.
A system image using either Easeus or Aomei will restore installed applications and documents. I also sometimes use Acronis but I never use the Windows backup utility.
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Before installing any new distro, I always test it out thoroughly in a VM, and then live-boot from a USB and test all the hardware on my device to ensure everything is going to work as expected. Dual-booting is another whole thing and something I avoid.
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Using a VM is a way to try an OS certainly. But then what OS hosts? Windows with all its poor memory management characteristics, susceptibility to viruses, mother-ship spying on you and even logging your every key-click (if you did Express install and not custom install). If thatâs the case whatâs the point of Linux?
The dual boot is a way to make Linux your daily drive and have access to Windows when on those occasions you need to do something eg run a special application only on Windows.
But I think this thread is straying away from the real issue. Itâs a company that is bilking people with a come on of support and not providing it. Imho, they just want to sell Linux and know they cant so they are just playing this game â that was my experience.
And not only that, Linux Mint gave me NO problem as dual boot. Linux Mint even works on a tablet, pretty much flawlessly out of box. Zorin OS gave me nothing but problems. So, stay away from Zorin is my word to the wise.
In the end, stay away from Zorin.
Again, canât strictly agree with that. This is usually only needed in the case a huge user error happened. In all these years setting up hundreds of OSes, this only happened once when I apparently didnât see the checkmark for âCheck if you want to format the whole hard drive before installationâ and everything was seemingly deleted. All the other times I had issues was related to some kind of user error. The only times the scenario could fit and the user would be not directly at fault, the hard drive would need to be broken without earlier notice. Though, if your hard drive already corrupts data in this way, you should replace it immediately, anyway.
I am really baffled that you are willing to go on a mini-crusade against some small company doing some business with their own Linux distribution.
Now letâs be honest:
There is Goggle, faceshit, Microshit, Uni Lever, Tencent, Alibaba and many other HUUUUUGE companies in the world that make your life worse every single day but you decide to keep riding on a small Linux related company, because of some experience, that frankly is most probably caused by the user himself.
I donât get that, at all.
Again, really bad judgement. Linux Mint/Ubuntu, etc. is the most famous distribution of GNU/Linux in the whole world. There is no way to justify a comparison between their stuff and some little groupâs stuff. Especially since Linux Mint was basically just a Hipster Ubuntu, so they didnât even do much work, as most of it was already done and finished within Ubuntu, in the first place.
Look at the top 5 distributions. See also which were the top 5 in the last 10 years. Linux Mint is one of the top distributions. ZorinOS is just some minor stuff that is trying to battle big enemies.
The year 2010 shows it also well. Mint was 3rd place, while Zorin was place 41.
Because of all the reasons portraited in my posts, I disapprove this statement.
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All that said, I wanted to add a little Addendum:
Despite what it looks like to some people, I DONâT endorse or promote using ZorinOS, as I donât even like this distribution!! 
I would recommend many other distros before even mentioning this one. All I want is fair treatment and even products I donât personally like, deserve fair treatment.
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Wait, you disagree âstay away from Zorinâ after saying it is 41 place in popular distros? Wait, you disagree âstay away from Zorinâ after they have basically ripped me (and most likely others) off.
Minor distro or not, they are not reputable distro is bottom line. And look at the number recent reviews of Zorin OS on sites like Youtube. Quite a lot. And all saying its a âbetterâ Linux Mint. Simply not true. This was the only thing that drew me to Zorin.
Iâm not a you-tuber. I donât have time or equipment. If I did, Iâd make a counter to all these (apparently sponsored â in one form or fashion or another) reviews.
If they are doing this to 100 people a month (minor distro) then they are taking $4000 out of people. But itâs likely higher.
You call it a âcrusadeâ. I call it letting the community know that there is a bad deamon in the system and it needs to be reaped through a reaper process, to put this in Linux vernacular.
If itâs not reaped, then Iâm afraid others are going to try the same thing. And that can only be harmful to the Linux and Open Source community as it only takes one bad apple to spoil the reputation of the whole barrel.
(Now is the time to grab Win 7 exodus of users and help them find a good/safe home in Linux â the right Linux.)
Iâm quite a recent Linux user. Moved to Linux completely early last year. Until then, before I learned Davinci, I used Linux just as a hobby, and for my work Windows and on top of it Magix VEGAS. This is a paid software. I remember on their forum some people complaining about unable to contact Magix support, no answer, no refund, etc. Big PITA. However, I myself needed the support couple times, they answered within 2 working days. Probably the same for thousands of users too. So sometimes something doesnât work correctly. Thatâs bad. But I also see, assuming on one bad example that every case ends faulty, is wrong I guess.
I understand you feel ripped off. Iâd repeatedly try to connect the support team to either ask my money back (refund), or to do provide the promised support.
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Youâre clearly not reading what I said, or at best, cherry picking.
Support of product bad =/= Product bad
This utterly proves that you are not reading and understanding what is being said. If youâd go one level higher, I would assume you are trolling.
Now you are starting to troll. There is clearly no âright Linuxâ for everything and everyone. Every Linux distribution has their own audience with their own reasons of using it.
I wonât engage in further discussion to comment on your monologues, since in a discussion both should listen to each other, which doesnât work if this is executed only one-sidedly.
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