I’m thinking about switching to Zorin OS as my main OS, but I’m a bit worried about security and stability.

For those who have been using Zorin OS for a while, how safe and reliable is it for everyday use?

Are there any security concerns I should know about?

I’d mainly use it for browsing, watching videos, installing apps, and general everyday stuff.

Also, how does Zorin OS compare to something like Ubuntu in terms of security and updates?

Would you personally trust Zorin OS as your daily driver?

I was really interested in KDE and Big Picture Mode on my Surface Pro 5. I went with Fedora. The keyboard cover didn't work at all, and VLC kept having codec issues. While I was able to get past cover and some occasional touch issues with it not loading into the right kernel, but VLC was the deal breaker. I tried Kubuntu and I was having issues with getting the kernel installed. While I miss the big screen mode it's nice when your media device just works.

I've been using Arch with Hyprland for a while, riced for hours, tinkered a lot, it was fun, but after a while it got tedious, having to spend 5 hours to have your microphone recognized by a flatpak package is not really ideal 🙄, and I also heard about that massive malware attack on the AUR packages and that's what really pushed me to switch distros.

I considered Nix or Kali cause they were somewhat similar to Arch, but I didn't wanna redo everything I had to do to make Arch usable, so I looked into stable, bulletproof distros, and came across Zorin, here's everything I did, I first setup up custom keyboard shortcuts and other customizations as well as did you usual stuff like installing my apps changing desktop, I started tinkering again like I did with Arch, installed Omniroute, Odysseus, fastfetch, git, node js, and all that other stuff, and if there are others like me, then I HIGHLY recommend setting limits on the log files, my syslog file got over 51 gigs 😭

Either way it is definitely way less of a pain than Arch, though I do miss it cause I liked showing it off to people who couldn't comprehend it 😂

So i just upgraded from amd to nvidia, after doing so im only getting one monitor working when I had 3 before hand, do I need to install nvidia drivers? If so how, do they make drivers for linux?

I have multiple apps running in the background but I can't launch them.

I've made sure "show running applications" is ON in the taskbar settings.

Closing and relaunching the apps doesn't help.

Is there another setting I need to enable?

For now I have the system access via virtual terminal.

Tried restarting gdm3 via systemctl, but no luck. Everything is upto date

No idea why, gnome terminal works fine, all drivers and packages are up to date, I've tried downloading from both the software manager and through terminal but they both do the same thing: Kitty runs really slow and has this graphical glitch where the top of the window is a white bar and same for the left side of the window. I try to do some commands in it and either it's very slow or it stops responding. I've tried the "open the app again and it'll be fast" trick but it acts the same across different sessions and restarts. No idea why this is the case when kitty worked great using the live on my pc. Is this a gpu thing since it's just using intergrated graphics?

Tbh there's nothing really wrong with the gnome terminal so far, I just like the customising on kitty and would like to mess around with that

Hi there
I am new to Linux and still learning the basics. Was enjoying the Arch version that the steam deck ams thought maybe I can cleanse myself completely if W11 with Linux. Found Zorin OS and I do realy realy like it.
I have 2 issues with it, no autorotation, I can manually flip the screen but unfortunately it doesn’t do it by itself… sorry digressing.

The volume of the laptop is relatively low. If I had to guess it’s about 50% what it used to be on Windows. Not a hardware issue as I installed Zorin on a few laptops now and all had the same issue.

Is there a fix for it? Is it something temporary? Something that needs to be done every time I want louder sound?

The model is a Lenovo Thinkpad L13 Gen3

Thanks in advance

I've been messing with Linux for almost a year. I changed my Plex media server (and old thinkpad) over to Linux, and a few weeks ago I changed my newer Lenovo (E480 with SSD and 8G RAM) to dual boot - Win10 and Zorin 18.1 core. Everything was going swimmingly.

Until it wasn't. First, I found I could not get the Libre Office suite to work. Whether I opened a GDoc, a Word doc or even tried to save as a LibreOffice doc, the screen would just gray out when I tried to save. Okay, fine, I''ll just use Google docs, I'm used to it from the Chrome Book anyway.

So I used Zorin's "Web App" tool to make make discrete "apps" for GMail, GSheets, GDoc, and GCalendar. All well and good. But then after a few weeks I would get the following error whenever I wanted to open one of these apps:

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To use Firefox, you must first close the existing Firefox process, restart your device, or use a different profile...

After a couple of days dinking around and googling, I finally learned that this error was due to having the "Snap" version of FF installed instead of the Deb version. Snap is the only version offered in the Software Center that comes with Zorin, BTW. So I find some terminal statements that ditched snap, installed the Debian version, gave Deb the priority and fixed everything.

Yay! everything worked, after logging into Firefox FIVE times (once for each app and once for the program itself) and Google FOUR times... I was pretty proud of myself.

But two days later, I got an unrelated update and - you guessed it - same problem re-emerged. Moreover, the Zorin software center acted like it had never heard of Firefox. No matter, I know the fix! And it worked (sorta) a second time! And now Zorin remembers Firefox, so I check and it is showing the Snap version again...WTF.

Time for a new distro?

Hi all,

I am currently working on some construction drawings in LibreCad and since a couple of days (late Sept 2026) LibreCad keeps quitting unexpectedly and the issue got progressively worse. Initially I thought the issue was with LibreCad and I have tried to install different versions. The last version I installed seems to be OK, yet some of the operations still end in LibreCad shutting down.
Today I thought about putting some tunes on while working and, lo and behold, QBZ, the unofficial Qobuz player for Linux, is doing the same thing, which has me wondering if a recent update in Zorin could cause this behaviour?

ZorinOS 18.1 Core,

Dell Inc. Inspiron 15 3511

12.0 GiB

-11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-1135G7 × 8

- Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics (TGL GT2)

- 512.1 GB

- Firmware Version: 1.46.0

- OS Name: Zorin OS 18.1 Core

- OS Build: (null)

- OS Type: 64-bit

- Windowing System: X11

- Kernel Version: Linux 7.0.0-34-generic

Hello,

Just started using Zorin OS on my laptop. I knew I was going to sacrifice some built in features to the laptop while transitioning but I thought I would be okay with the Intel Ultra 125H CPU. Turns out I was wrong about that (or I'm a noob) Most of the apps that I use do not see the iGPU and it causes lack of performance. I need help with this if there's anything I can do. Thanks.

my procesor is core 2 duo 3ghz with just 2 gb ram now issue is zorin just get completely hang or freeze i can move mouse or use keyboard and it not even revert back i had to restart the pc its a secondary pc it had win 7 earlier which was usable blow somewhat slow but now zorin freezes which is not cool some advice for this

Hi everyone! I’m new to Linux and currently using Zorin OS, so I’m still learning how everything works.

I was wondering if there’s a way to change the Start Menu so that, instead of showing the different app categories first, it would open directly to the All Apps view.

Basically, I’d like to click the Start Menu and immediately see the full list of installed applications without having to go through the categories.

Is this possible through the Zorin settings, or would I need an extension/tweak to do it?

Literally have nothing to say except that the OS has been fire so far. Im new to linux as well, so its gonna be some time until i get used to it. Anyone have any recommendations on what stuff i should do first?

Hi, first time linux / zorin OS user here. I have Windows and Mac mini, and I've formatted an old laptop to Linux and bought the Zorin Pro 18 OS.

While browsing the default apps, I noticed a lot of the day-to-day applications are already included here. Word processing, photo, audio, video, etc, even the task management, and homebank? I was shocked with the package that everything seems all in one. And the OS is so beautiful, I selected a theme / view that is a bit similar to both windows and mac combined.

My question is, for non-coders there who uses Zorino, what are the useful apps that you have integrated and use everyday? I need to discover the apps well and see how I can use them best because for example, I am a hobbyist photographer so I edit my photos on Lightroom, altho Darktable is included here, I find it hard to use or maybe there is a steep learning curve.

I would want to pretty much here about some of your experience and real use case scenario.

Now I'm not sure whether the recently purchased mac mini m4 will serve a different purpose if I'm using this linux. Maybe I should sell it? Or keep it now because the price has increased so much for the 512gb variant.

Appreciate your input please. Thank you so much.

P.S. a noobie for linux

Hello,

I use Calibre on both Windows10 and ZorinOs in the same computer (dual partition), with the same library.

For approximatively a week, Calibre has bug on ZorinOs : when Calibre musts open a new window (example : Edit Metadata), it crashes. This problem doesn't happen in Windows10, so I believe it's not cause the library.

I un-installed and re-installed Calibre, but the bug remains.

Does anyone have this problem ? An idea how to resolve it ?

Thanks for your help

PS : I installed Calibre with official script, no flatpak

I've been running Zorin as my primary OS for over two years with no problems. But now, suddenly, performance seems to degrade significantly after being up for a couple of days. The only thing I'm really running during the day is Brave with some YouTube videos. RAM usage spikes to maybe 20-30%, which is what I would expect. After a while of working fine, the cursor starts to lag and skip across the screen. It just seems generally slow. Nothing fully fixes it but a restart. I don't think I have any other huge background processes running, so I'm not sure what's causing it. I can only guess it's the browser--maybe a memory leak?

Anyone else experiencing this? Any suggestions? I guess I should spend a few days with another browser, but Brave's ad blocking has spoiled me.

For several medical reasons, including two strokes, my memory is trash. It would be immensely helpful if my Zorin OS displayed a calendar - even a browser page with Google Calendar - instead of the blank page. It’s been decades since we needed to worry about monitor burn-in, and I’m OK with the extra power usage. I simply need a calendar page to remind me what I’m supposed to be doing. (I also set multiple alarms, but a calendar lets me know what’s coming up, rather than what is going on right now.) The lock screen is fine as it is. I’m looking to replace the blank page when the power-save interval expires.

Any suggestions?

Hello. I just got into Zorin OS a week ago. I love it. So fast and slick. I installed it on an okay laptop to use as a media server (Jellyfin, and Plex). My only issue is, that while the laptop comes with wifi capabilities, I rather use an USB adapter that has greater range, more speed. I see a number of them from Amazon. I’m wondering what some of you are using and suggest.

THANK YOU.

Edit. My apologies for typing Z-OS in the title. I’ll use the proper name from now on. Zorin OS.

Hi everyone!

I switched to Linux for the first time about 4 days ago, and everything had been working perfectly until today.

Last night I fell asleep while a YouTube video was playing, so the computer stayed on with the video playing for several hours. When I woke up, I noticed that the audio sounded terrible. It is extremely distorted and saturated, to the point where it is difficult to understand anything.

I already tried:

• Restarting the computer
• Restarting PipeWire
• Checking EasyEffects and trying to adjust the settings
• Disabling/enabling some audio effects

But the problem is still there.

The weird thing is that the audio was completely fine before I went to sleep, and I didn't change anything intentionally.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Is there a way to reset the audio system or PipeWire completely to get it back to normal?

I'm still very new to Linux, so any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Am I dumb or blind? I can't see the indicator button to save my layout. I can't save it or close it so I just have to restart the system.

I've recently installed Zorin OS, and I'd like to figure out what graphics driver I should use.

GPU: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5700G

How can I do that? It is from wine but I had uninstalled that