ALL of the listed features from zorin pro have free alternatives, unless you really want microsoft office, screen sharing, adobe premier, etc... just stick with the free version and find free viable alternatives. Libreoffice, kdenlive, etc. How did you land on zorin to begin with? Most new users are recommended to use fedora, ubuntu-gnome, and linux mint. To me, just looking at zorins website they do not share the most basic principles of the linux space (being free and open source). I highly recomend switching, if you could run

echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

This will output the name of your display manager like gnome, kde, etc. The version of zorin you are running is more than certainly using a popular one. Just find a distro that uses the same one. And your user experience will be almost exactly the same. Zorin might have some QOL features but definitely not anything you couldnt implement yourself.

Feel free to reach out here for more help if you run into any brick walls. You already dual booted your pc so i have faith that you have a pretty good grasp on what you are doing. If time is a factor and you just need a distro that "works" stick with what you have, and find FOSS alternatives for zorin. Best of luck

It's kind of creepy, weird, and unusual. However, I can see someone building a distro and creating a bunch of non-OSS themes and basically selling the themes. That's not beyond the pale, although it is (again) questionably moral given that they probably created all of those themes using free software that they didn't pay for. But whatever.. just keep that in mind.

The usual way of commoditizing Linux is to sell service - so you get, like, 4 tickets a month or something where someone is guaranteed to be there to try to fix whatever problem you have within a reasonable amount of time, and you don't have to either rely on the kindness of strangers.

Zorin is mainstream enough that I suspect if they were really violating the GPL, someone would be on their case already. You can't - usually, depending on the license - just repackage OSS and sell it. So if that's how you wanted to spend your money, you do you and don't worry about the comments on this thread.

Oh, about your question: according to the upgrade page, the "upgrade" is just access to more packages, probably in another repos. You won't have to re-install the distribution, and there won't be any impact on your dual boot. You're just getting more packages to install.

You can't - usually, depending on the license - just repackage OSS and sell it.

I'm pretty sure you can.
GNU's Selling Free Software is for the GPL & doesn't specifically address selling someone else's OSS. But you should (I think?) be able to, so long as you don't violate the license. There are multiple views to selling foss, but I don't think that many will object, if you for example sell Linux DVDs at a low cost. (Not common any more, but this has been done before, I've heard)

I don't know much about Zorin, but selling foss is not inherently evil & illegal.

The whole thing about selling DVDs was that you were selling the DVD, not the distribution on it. You were "charging a reasonable price for the service of burning the DVD, for the media, and for distribution." Much of that went away with the internet, when people could download and burn ISOs themselves. It used to be quite common; not just distributions, but CDs full of OSS software. Again, the assumption and expectation was that you weren't selling the software, but the media. There was no such thing as a "Pro" version of Linux. There were commercial distributions, and there was a period when companies were trying to figure out ways to commoditize OSS, but there were also lawsuits, and it mostly settled out to be service agreements, which were in the end more lucrative anyway.

I disagree about the immorality of selling FOSS. Even in the very rare case that you built the entire program, from scratch, using no FOSS libraries, you probably still used gcc, or the Python interpreter, or go or rustc. And on most cases, you are using libraries that other people created and gave away for free. And instead of giving back to the community, so that the people who's software you're implicitly selling that your software is built and depends on, can't use it similarly for free. And odds are also good that, despite your shim is utterly reliant on their hard work, you're not splitting up the profit and sharing it with them. How much money do those people send to Linus Torvalds? Or the countless kernel contributors? To the people who've worked on libc?

I have absolutely no issue with people who request donations for the software that they built and regularly and consistently maintain. And people charging for OSX or Windows software? It costs more than just free time to develop and release on those platforms - the entire chain is commercial. But when your product is an unmeasurably tiny fraction of all of the gratis effort that went into the end product, well. It doesn't seem right to profit on other's work, does it?

Look, we're a capitalist society. It takes someone time and material to make a chair from scratch, and when you take it, they don't have it any more. They used nothing free except maybe YouTube videos, or their parent's training. The FOSS software ecosystem is the closest thing we have to a functioning communism in the world; it works because, while it may take my time to create something, it doesn't cost me more than my time, and once it's done it can be endlessly replicated and used by innumerable people at no significant cost to me. When actors take advantage of the free ecosystem and don't contribute back in like fashion, in my book that's unethical.

Stallman's usual take is "Yeah sure you can sell it, as long as you respect the 4 freedoms.". So I don't think selling Free Software is against the spirit of FOSS. The issue is rather that the Free Software is against the spirit of selling because realistically you can sell it to one entity which can then just make 7 billion copies of said software. At that point it's no longer financially viable to sell it for you.

I also think that the majority of people creating Free Software would be fine with someone else selling it. Remember how much permissive-licensed software is out there. If authors really cared, they would have licensed the software under GPL, but instead they even allow it to be used with commercial licensing. Obviously I'm not taking away your opinion, but I don't think your opinion represents the majority of FOSS.

They're not really paywalling FOSS, though. You can absolutely install it all and configure it yourself. You're paying for them to do the work so you don't have to.

I think it's pretty benign to charge for that to support development.

I agree re: Fedora, especially the atomic varieties. I do think Zorin is good at what it is but it has a pretty specific use case.

Also, had no idea you were also in this community. Pleasant surprise.

Had the same thought, it's always nice to encounter a civilized person of distinguished taste and culture out here in the wilds.

That's not it at all. You don't think accountants who juggle numbers and Excel formulas all day couldn't learn? Lawyers whose entire job involves absorbing and filtering vast amounts of information? Doctors who diagnose machines that are far more complex than computers (people)? Of course they could; I worked around these people in IT for 20 years, I can tell you that despite how stupid these folks seem around computers they feel the same way about your capabilities in their field of expertise, only they don't have the arrogance to assume that everyone should learn to be a mechanical engineer or dentist in order to understand their job.

What they are is too busy doing other shit that they care more about. They don't have the time or interest to be farting around with a computer to do anything more than the absolute minimum requirements needed to do the shit they actually care about. Human society functions because people specialize, and people who don't specialize in making computers go just don't care enough about them as anything other than as a tool and maybe an occasional source of entertainment to waste their time learning. Just like you don't waste your time learning about how to run a nuclear power plant.

And I say this as someone who used to love tinkering with computers, turned it into a career, and slowly grew to hate it. I too no longer care about optimizing or fiddling or tweaking, I just want the magic box to work so I can do the stuff I care about (writing, gaming, etc.)

Well, lucky for them their fields aren't under constant attack by droves of idiots constantly being catered to. There is no watering down of those fields in the name of "user friendliness".

Also, they don't expect people to understand their field, but people don't interact and touch legal stuff or doctor stuff on a daily basis like people do with computers. If they did, then they would no doubt feel the same way about idiots who can't grasp the basics and refuse to learn the slightly more advanced shit.

It's 2025. There's no reason for anybody - but especially the older group - to not know what the start button is, or keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste, for example.

What does 'watering down' even mean? Why is 'user friendliness' bad? Do you want computers that are harder to use for some reason? If that was the case why don't you also give up your favorite OS or interface or language and go back to carting around stacks of punch-cards or flipping physical switches to set memory registers? Or are you just trying to make yourself feel useful as an IT person?

Also, I dunno if you know this, but people interact with health and legal shit all the time, that's why there are people who only do that job. Reading some email and punching some numbers into an excel sheet are about the equivalent of signing a lease or getting a flu shot. It's not their job to know how things work behind the scenes, just like it's not your job to know how to make vaccines or write legally binding contracts.

And finally, you're forgetting two important facts.
1. Older people tend to have been in their jobs longer and at higher levels
2. Companies, especially in certain industries, don't update their hardware/software as often as IT would like them to.

So that old guy you think ought to be able to know what a start button is might have never seen one because the only computers they use at work are old SPARCstations from the early 2000s, or might've worked in a bank for the last 50 years that is still using AS/400s from the late 80s or whatever that can't even run windows. You tell me, what are the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste hotkeys on a DEC Alpha? Where's the power button on an SGI Onyx? I worked IT in a hospital in the late 90s that was still using computers from the early 70s for shit, it happens way more often than you think.

Man, where to even start on this...

"Watering down" is the MS approach to design - take all the power user features, and make them less useful and less efficient to use (or just get rid of them altogether). It's a slow burn to "Take that to the nearest certified Microsoft Store so they can repair it for you".

The entire design is focused around making things HARDER to use. Less reliance on a terminal, dynamic menus whose contents are clusterfucked into little panels instead of proper menus. Hell, look at the Printers dialogue in Windows 7 and prior, then compare that to the trash they've thrown in Win 10 and 11. Everything is designed to look flashy, and be as impossibly inefficient to use. But it looks less intimidating, so stupid users love it!

Reading some email and punching some numbers into an excel sheet are about the equivalent of signing a lease or getting a flu shot.

Not sure where you're from, but when I get a flu shot, I sit in a chair and somebody who knows how to administer the shot gives it to me. I also don't get a flu shot for several hours a day several days a week. Same with leases, I may sign one every few years at most, and if it's for something serious then I would get a lawyer involved. That said, I am at least competent enough to sit in the chair and get the shot without asking "what's a chair? How do I sit? Where is my arm?" Likewise, I can read a lease and not have to ask "What is a lease? What is a signature? How do I sign this page?" I can't say the same about people in 2025 who say "What's the start button?" or have no idea that decades-old shortcuts like ctrl+c and ctrl+v are things.

Also, if you consider the amount of marketing and exposure to computers that people have had by now, yes, I would expect just about everybody to know what the fuck a Start button is. Shit, if you hold your mouse over it, I'm almost certain it even pops a tooltip that says "Start". Some of these people have worked at this same company for decades, and have no doubt touched generations of Windows software.

As for how to copy/paste on those older computers - I guess it depends on how you're accessing them as to whether or not you even can copy/paste. But at the same time, I wouldn't be nearly as frustrated if somebody wasn't quite sure how to navigate through something that isn't as commonplace as a Windows computer - you might as well say you're "not very competent with pencils and paper".

It has not been my experience that MS removes or weakens tools like that. What they do is hide them, like what they did in the transition from the control panel to the modern settings interface in 10/11. It's easier for people who don't know what they're doing to navigate (and harder for them to stumble into settings that could really mess things up), but it's just slower to navigate and harder to find the shit you want when you're not doing bog-standard end-user stuff. But also the control panel is still there and still works exactly how it used to, so you can just use it instead. If there's a 'watering down' there it's that the search function prefers to return results for for the settings menu rather than the control panel so you have to navigate to it by hand, but you can just pin that shit to your start menu like everything else and keep using it like it's still 2005.

The entire design is focused around making things HARDER to use. Less reliance on a terminal, dynamic menus whose contents are clusterfucked into little panels instead of proper menus.

Only for people who are doing complex technical stuff and accessing features that aren't commonly needed by the end-user. For everyone else not having 400 options that they don't understand and will never use cluttering everything up makes it easier to use, not harder. Most end-users never want to see a terminal, and those clustered toolbars make it easier - when coming at it fresh without years or decades of expectations - not harder to find what what you're looking for. Especially if you're visually impaired like I am. This strikes me as just 'the way I learned is faster' without the awareness that it's because you took the time to learn it and don't want to have to learn something new. And I get it. I spent hours and hours learning all of the menu hotkey combinations for Lotus 1-2-3 in the late 80s, and I was fast as shit at plucking out those obscure features from 12 menus deep with a few keystrokes, so I was very salty when Excel came along and displaced it with its graphical menus and mouse pointer that was so much slower than the hotkeys I had learned. But also Excel was vastly more popular than Lotus 1-2-3 ever was because it was a lot easier for accountants to use, and Excel has (or had, I haven't used it in a while) hotkeys for most of its menu items anyway (alt+key to pull down a menu, then each entry had a letter underlined so you could quickly pick that option, much like using /, (w)orksheet, (c)olumn, (a)dd or whatever from Lotus 1-2-3.)

That's not 'watering down', that's improving: making things better for the vast majority of people, while requiring folks like us - whose entire job is to learn and understand computer shit - to bear the burden of having to relearn a few things. I guarantee you there were programmers out there complaining about the widespread adoption of early high-level languages because 'by god the best way to code is to manually flip the bits in core memory with a magnet' or whatever, but it's no different than when new laws get passed or new diagnostic or treatment standards get approved. Technological progress and reinvention is just the nature of living in an industrial society. If you don't want to keep up with it, pick another field like I did.

when I get a flu shot, I sit in a chair and somebody who knows how to administer the shot gives it to me. ... Same with leases, I may sign one every few years at most, and if it’s for something serious then I would get a lawyer involved.

Exactly my point: you and an accountant both have a very shallow, straightforward experience with a complex technical subject because others have gone to considerable lengths to take care of the immense volume of technical details and obscure them from your view. I'm going to guess that you understand as much about how to safely store and administer vaccines or which of 12 related statutes applies to your particular case as he does about the SMTP protocol or Ethernet, so why do you expect him to not get a professional involved when he runs into 'something serious' just like you do? And keep in mind that what seems trivial to you or I can be quite serious and intractable to him.

I am at least competent enough to sit in the chair and get the shot without asking “what’s a chair? How do I sit? Where is my arm?” Likewise, I can read a lease and not have to ask “What is a lease? What is a signature? How do I sign this page?” I can’t say the same about people in 2025 who say “What’s the start button?” or have no idea that decades-old shortcuts like ctrl+c and ctrl+v are things.

This is a straw man. You are exaggerating the stupidity of others to create a false example against which you are arguing, and while a few of those people certainly exist (I had a guy tell me his computer wouldn't turn on and then when I asked him to try his response was to loudly say 'Computer, on! -- see? Nothing happens'), most people can muddle through simple stuff like navigating menus even if they don't know what they're called.

I did tech support for a couple of years in the late 90s, I have walked people who have literally never touched a computer before through replacing their motherboard (CPU, RAM, cables, even DIP switches and jumpers.) It's been my experience that there's a kind of mental line that most people draw that separates technical stuff into two categories: 'I can probably figure this out', and 'OMG this is way too much I don't even know where to start.' I have talked to many, many people on both sides of that line, and there seems to be no middle ground. People go from 'I think I can swim?' straight to 'holy shit I'm drowning'. When they've assigned computer stuff to the far side of that line they actively reject thinking about it, especially when jargon is involved. If you ask them where their files are stored they might gesture vaguely at the box under their desk, but if you ask them what a hard drive is they will shrug and go 'Iono man, must be some of that wacky technical shit I don't understand'. They have some idea what a hard drive - or a start button - is, they use it every day, but if you put them on the spot while they're in 'I dunno anything' mode they're not even going to try to make the connection and ask 'wait, is that the menu that all my programs are in?', they'll just go 'Dunno man, that must be some of that technical shit that's beyond me.'

And it works both ways. I have had certified network engineers tell me 'Of course it's plugged in, what kind of an idiot do you think I am?' when it turned out not to be plugged in. There's the stuff you know and the stuff you feel confident stretching for; everything else just doesn't even get considered.

As for how to copy/paste on those older computers - I guess it depends on how you’re accessing them as to whether or not you even can copy/paste. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be nearly as frustrated if somebody wasn’t quite sure how to navigate through something that isn’t as commonplace as a Windows computer - you might as well say you’re “not very competent with pencils and paper”.

The point is that you don't know because you don't have to, you've never had to use them (and what's 'commonplace' for you isn't necessarily common at all for others.) The same is true for those people who have been working in banks for decades and haven't seen anything more modern than an IBM PCjr. Your frustration that people don't understand stuff that's common to you is equivalent to their frustration that you don't know how to write programs in RPG2 or Fortran. They probably don't think you're stupid for not knowing why certain kinds of RAM can cause 'make world' on BSD systems to fail halfway through, so why do you think they are for not knowing stuff that they may not have been exposed to very much?

I think your expectations might be rather skewed. For example, do you know how common it is to just not own a PC in the days of ubiquitous consoles and tablets and smartphones? I have 11 adult nieces and nephews, two of them own PCs, and only then because their mother wanted someone to play WoW with her when they were kids and they stuck with PC gaming. But every one of them has a phone, at least an xbox or playstation, most of them own a Switch or Steam deck or similar, etc. Meanwhile the last console I owned still had wood paneling on the front (Atari 2600.) Peoples' experiences with technology are different, some are intrigued by it and drawn to learn more, some just see it as a tool that sits in a drawer until they need to turn some metaphorical bolts. It's absurd to assume that everyone has the same experience and interest and understanding with a subject that you do.

The biggest hole in your argument is that it isn't 1993 anymore, and the internet has a whole wealth of information on how to do shit, not to mention how hard it would be to have never touched a computer if you're any more than 5 years old.

People could take the 30 seconds to get the answer, but instead they'd prefer to just be stupid and allow big tech to slowly repeal rights to repair.

I've done corporate IT. I've talked to people who somehow use a computer every day but still haven't grasped basic 30+ year old concepts.

The reliance on IT to do the most basic shit is great for me from an employment standpoint, but we are equitr clearly being herded slowly toward the "Take that to your certifies Microsoft repair center for service " path. It'll only be a matter of time before Computers are as pathetic as the pocket computers we call smart phones.

Google and Apple have not just convinced people that they don't need full ownership of their phones, but that having that level of access is actually somehow a bad thing.

We're already seeing laptops with batteries sealed in, and not just Surface Pro tablet style ones, either.

We shouldn't be coddling and encouraging ignorance of everyday things. If you can do a jigsaw puzzle, you're overqualified to build a computer - you may need help picking the right parts, but assembly should be straight forward. If you work a job that requires computer usage, you should know at least the basics of the OS. If you worked in a shop where your job was to cut a pipe to length using a saw, would you really have that job for long if you had no idea how to use a saw, and refused to learn the basics of using the saw? A computer is a tool no less than a saw is.

It does "support" LVM, but with a wacky/hacky workaround and that's a real shame !

Also, there is some talking on github on how they will probably completely drop LVM in the near futur... That's not what someone should expect from a Linux installer!

Also, there is some talking on github on how they will probably completely drop LVM in the near futur... That's not what someone should expect from a Linux installer!

It's a shitshow. Looking at their repo's issues list has lots of noise, but the worst of them is that the LVM issue has been open for over a year now. Sure, open source, anyone's free to work on it by why would distros use such a feature incomplete installer?

You're both being silly. Ones a gatekeeper, ones a name caller

Want to know what's wrong with Linux? The community.

Correct. There are actual efforts going on to resolve those issues. Which begs the question, why post vague exhortations for people to "do something" about this, rather than focusing the efforts in places where it will make a difference?

This isn't a post saying "hey, come to this project and pitch in." This post is just bitching into the ether and then some folks getting butthurt when the pointless performative nonsense is called out for what it is.

Posts like this one happen on a near-daily basis all across FOSS mailing lists. It's trivial to find numerous, often young, often inexperienced people who think their idea is the one that "fixes everything". These people reason that everyone should fall over one another to put effort into their magical idea once they see the obviousness and correctness of the idea. Clearly, it's simply incorrect to find fault in an obviously perfect idea such as this one.

It's just so weird that literally none of the people with these amazing ideas are the ones doing a "git init" and getting started on the work of actually implementing their amazing ideas. Bizarre how so many spectacular, world-changing ideas need to be worked on by literally anyone BUT their champion. What a horrible world we must live in filled with nasty, evil people who simply won't volunteer their personal time when we should feel so blessed with this holy relic of an idea.