 Zorn OS is not one of those distros that I've spent a lot of time with so I'm not all that familiar with it I know the general concept of it, and I know that they specific specifically target new users And I know that they have done a really good job in making their desktop environments their own without having to go through And actually fork a desktop environment and creating or creating a new one so those that's about the Depth of my knowledge of Zorn OS So I thought it was about time that I actually took a look at one of their releases So today we're gonna be taking a look at Zorn OS 16 light now This comes with a very customized version of XFCE and it should be really pretty so we're gonna take a look at it Let's go ahead and jump in So while we're waiting we know that Zorn OS is based on a boom 2 and I believe it's based on the latest LTS, but I could be wrong about that. We'll check that once we get in there So we have some nice animations here, and we have a cool wallpaper. So this looks like the ubiquity installer So we're just gonna go ahead and install it right off the bat We'll see what it looks like after we've done the install. So this is English English US. That's correct We'll continue. We don't want to download updates We'll just do all those at the end because you'd have to update anyways might'll do them all at once and Then we don't want to participate participate in the census this time And we'll keep the codex stuff Go ahead and do next Or continue. Okay, so we have the regular partition thing here If do they offer you they do offer ZFS here So if you wanted to use ZFS you could do so you also encrypt your drive You're still no option here to have separate home and partitions automatically selected for you So you if you wanted to do separate home partition, you'd have to go through and do that yourself I wish more installers would go through and actually enable you to do the separate home partition With their automatic partitioning tools instead of having to go through and do the partitioning yourself because that would be a really cool But honestly, there's not a lot of distros out that do that. So we'll go ahead and install now and then Continue I will say without any borders around this this stuff kind of blends in you know what I mean but being a little judgy Matt and then New York is fine We'll enter my name here and we'll call this is Zoran VM and That is fine and we'll enter a super duper password and Then we will go ahead and hit continue and it's going to hit install I will go ahead and cut the video here and we'll come back when it's done. Okay, there we go It looks like it took about five minutes or so so about normal in terms of installation of a boon to dis space distro So I'm going to go ahead and it restart. We'll see if it actually ends up removing the ISO from the boot partition, but we'll see sometimes VM the virtual machine does sometimes it doesn't and it did awesome Okay, so let's go ahead and enter our super duper password and This is X FCE like you've never seen it before I Would say now we have a little bit of a tour. So we're going to start tours. So open the menu to launch apps Okay so you can see right away that this is kind of funneled towards new users because Most people are going to know that's what you do But you can tell how they've done the tour that that's who they're focusing on you can choose your desktop look with Zoran appearance because so let's go ahead and launch that while we're here So let's see so we got two different options here and we can either do this one Which is we're on or this one which appears just to make the Launcher icons down here to go away and change it with more Old-style windows windows open things You can obviously get more layouts by upgrading to their pro version and the last time I tried Zoran OS which I have tried it for briefly. I seem to remember them giving you more options, but they've changed their Layout or the number of distros that they offer versions that they offer So it looks like those are the only two layouts that you get for free And not that you couldn't go through and just recreate those if you wanted so here's the the dark mode which we're going to change Because the dark mode should be a default and we'll change the accent colors purple Desktop the icons on desktop by you could do that by default So you don't have to download anything like you know, I'm tweaks or anything if you were using a version You know, this is XFC so you should get that well I want to why that even have to enable that because XFC E has I Wonder if you turn that off if you can't put any icons on there at all. Yeah, you can't click if you turn that off You can't click on the desktop at all Okay, I didn't even know that was something that XFC could disable honestly tell you the truth Okay, and then you can change fonts here as well. Okay, so that's cool All right moving on to the next thing in the tour set up your speed up your virtual machine and install guest edition So it detects automatically that I'm in a virtual machine and offers to install guest editions I'm not going to do that. I don't need them But if you are going to be using this in a VM, that's cool touch And then this is going to be the software center Well, we're gonna I'll focus on the software center here and say well, let's go ahead and do the next one And then this is the it so we'll visit the help page if we need help and we hit close So that's the tour. It's a nice little tour. It's not full of a lot of information But you can you know, it's not meant to be I don't think This is a typical GNOME software center thing or SNAP software center thing which depending on which one it is They both tend to take a long time to load that first time So it looks like they're going to be focusing on flat packs instead of snaps But while we're waiting for that, let's go ahead and take a look at the menu. Shall we so this is going to be There's the software center. Okay, we'll take a look at that in a minute. Let's go ahead and open up a terminal terminal emulator Okay, so this is XFC for terminal. I wonder why that when you search for terminal So this is the terminal emulator here is just like a um Like a shortcut to this. Okay All right, so if we do a uname Dash a we're seeing this is going this is using kernel 5.11. So not the most recent is neofetch installed is not So let's go ahead and do our updates here then while we're here There shouldn't be too many because this was just released. Yeah, there's not too many. So go ahead and do that Okay, so the updates are done. That didn't take very long at all. So we'll do sudo apt install neofetch Zoom in here a little bit. I wonder why I boarded. I did. Yes Let's try again Did I do something wrong? Yeah, apparently I hit equals. Yes, which I have no clue how I did Oh, because I was zooming in that's the reason why okay All right, so we there we go. So this is xfc using the xfwm for when When a manager this is using these themes here, but these are custom zorn themes You could obviously change those. I wonder because normally xfc is a whole bunch of different tools We'll take a look at that those in a minute. This is um bash dot 5.0 17 so I don't believe that's the most recent either and as we said earlier before it's um 5.11 is the kernel We're looking at about 1700 packages, which is about normal for debian slash ubuntu base distro and there's 12 flat packs installed Okay, so let's go ahead and close this out here And uh, we'll come back to you software center a little bit later. Um, we don't need to do that We just did that. Okay, so we're going to go ahead and go through the applications here now Just real quick. Interestingly, this is how you have to click on the category. So we have archive manager clocks fonts Onboard rush redshift is here by default xf burn, which is still included with a lot a lot of links distributions And I'm not sure why there's some games here. Nothing unusual Uh, nothing like steam or anything pre-installed. So you'd have to install that if you wanted to install it Graphics we have gimp here And the library office suite as well, which is where we'd see in the office here Is library office. What version of library office? We can go ahead and take a look at the library office Writer and see what version you get it is nicely themed So it fits in with the rest of the operating system, which is nice And they did change if you notice by default library office comes with their standard old and I mean old looking Interface this is the tabbed interface by default. So that they they've changed just the tabbed interface by default Which is good. So we can go here go to Surprisingly, I can't find out there we go right there This is version 7.2.3.2 And I believe that's going to be the most recent version but or at least close So that's cool. And I I love that they changed the This is this should be the library office y by default. I mean, yes, it looks like word, but it's good Anyways, that is library office Let's go ahead and multimedia here. I believe we skipped internet So we got cheese all the the normal stuff rhythm box for your music parole Is that what that is parole media player? I've never heard of that before in my life I wonder why they just didn't use vlc But that's just that's a choice that a lot of distributors make So we have firefox by is a default web browser We have thunderbird as our mail client and here's where I'm interested because Xfc has all their its own settings manager But zoren also has its own settings manager So it'll be interesting to see if they've taken anything out. So we have zoren appearance, which we already looked at I'm going to say they haven't actually taken anything out. Where's this? Let's see if there's a Settings manager here settings. Okay, so yeah, this is the xfc settings manager But it looks weird because it's themed right right out of the bat So it looks a little different to me, but it's been a long time since I've used xfc You know any for more than like a few minutes But this is going to have the normal fc fx fce stuff in it Including your ability to change themes if you wanted to change themes So this would allow you to do things that are outside of the zoren appearance app change icons fonts and settings Obviously, and then you can go through and change your hardware settings and window manager settings and stuff like that. So Yeah, that is the xfc settings manager. So if you're if you're used to using xfc This is still here so that you can still manage your xfc desktop Just like you normally would so let's go ahead and open up a web browser here and find the release notes See if we can't see What is different from the last version now you're gonna remember I didn't use the last version I think I did a video on zoren as before now that i'm thinking about it But it's been so long ago. I don't even remember I've been YouTubing now for a whole year and obviously I can't remember every video i've done Because memory is for young people Anyway, so let's go ahead zoren 16 oops light release Notes here we go Zornos 16 has been refreshed with a revamped and refined appearance out of the box We were introduced the new more polished default theme from zornos 16 that's easier on the eyes You'll find detailed touches and delightful animations throughout the system. Let's see if we have I'm guessing that then there any animations would be kiboshed by the vm So we also have some more artwork and desktop wallpapers, which actually we can actually look here if we look at Desktop settings So these are the wallpapers that come pre-installed Let's go to something a little bit more summary. I guess That's uh, at least not so wintery outside. These are nice. There's nothing here specifically zorn brandon branded Nice wallpapers. Let's close that. That's just the normal xfce wallpapers desktop manager thing a new taskbar with window previews. So if we Hover over is apparently that's only with the other So let's go ahead and join appearance and choose the other other layout. Apparently if you hover over the ship You get a window previews. Okay, that's cool Okay, additional desktop layouts in the pro light edition those two words don't really go together but okay So the says we're introducing two new desktop layouts for zon os 16 pro light chromo That's like and windows classic like so as we saw here in the Appearance if you go through and pay for them You can get some you get the mac layout. You'll get windows. You'll get something more traditional like gnom too I think that's what that kind of looks like. Uh, and actually this more looks like the I bet you that's gonna be more of a Chroma wash and this is going to be the windows version But there's no there's absolutely no reason why If you didn't want a shelf cache, you couldn't go through and re and you know recreate those on your own That's the thing about linux So the windows classic like desktop layout uses a traditional list style taskbar Where the simple app menu designed to feel familiar for veteran computer users I just want to tell them that windows hasn't looked like that in A long long time and they did say classic So they were really meaning it the new latest new layouts complement the four other layouts Which have been tweaked and improved since thornos 15 light You'll be able to choose so I was right You used to be able to get those layouts in the non pro version at least that's the way it makes it seem here You'll be able to choose between those desktop layouts in the layout section of zon appearance So here's a picture of those layouts or at least a couple of the layouts here. So we get the Mac watch like you know, I'm too Like layout and we have the windows like layout default and the windows list layout So those are cool and they they've apparently gone through and redesigned zon appearance Which Is this app here which you where you had opened up? um, honestly, I don't I don't really remember What this looked like before by my time way that was really short before as well um, I think maybe The theme and the layout and all this stuff was on just one page And but I could be wrong about that in zero 16 We refreshed the layouts to make it even easier to find customization options with the category tabs moved from the top To the left side of the window desktop layouts have been separated into a dedicated tab And you can now set the size of desktop icons independently from the files app. Okay, that's cool Oh, we didn't look at the files app. So we'll look at this. So this is going to be I believe this is going to be thunar. Yeah, this is thunar thunar is a good Uh window manager or excuse me a good good window manager. I got window managers on the mind Thunar is a good file manager. It's not my favorite anymore. I moved to nemo and then I moved obviously to crusader, which is not my Absolute fave, but this is nice. I will say that the tux touch targets on the Edges of the windows can be really finicky. Apparently you can only move it from the top The top seems to work fine. But if you hover down here at the bottom Getting that you that the arrow to show up to resize the window is I saw a flash. Oh, there it is Yeah, that the the target for those the bottom corner seems to be really off So if you can see that and you can barely see it with my face there It's uh, like it's not really in the corner. It's more a little up So that's a little up. It's weird because the top and the sides have much better Targets, okay, but anyways, that's just a small thing that I noticed Okay, so let's go ahead and finally take a look at the software center. So this is probably GNOME software Yeah, it's 3.36. So it's pretty old in terms of where the software center is now GNOME has gone through and redesigned the software center since this point, I believe And uh, let's see here. We can go through and uh, ah, yeah, this is what I was remembering right here So you can choose from the snap store And uh, you can choose several different versions from the snap store and um, apparently Wonder why I was saying at the beginning was saying update flat pack or something So apparently this comes from snap the snap store. I wonder Like, uh, let's choose when we know that it has a A flat hub version. Uh, you can't get it from some things from flat up. So so there's their Store here pulls from the zoren os to put repositories from flat hub and from the snap store. So that should give you a really broad range of software And it looks like they know what they're doing. We're looking at you elementary os. This is how you do it Uh, I can say Yeah, this is a store that has is going to pretty much have everything in it. So let's just go ahead and search for steam here Uh, which steam was right there on the front the front page. So obviously they have it. Yeah, they have steam here Uh, I don't even know what I'd go through like they have lutris Do they have zero ad? Here they do. So it looks like the software selection is really really good So it what about something rare like audacium? No, I didn't quite think so, but you can install that using apt I suppose So that's the software center. Do we get a terminal? Yep, we do get super Or control t does give us a terminal. So we can look for Go to h top here h top is not installed If you're using about 1.75 gigabytes, but we've been opening stuff up. So that's not going to be accurate Uh, it's using 97 tasks 330 threads, which is an interesting thing. We also have firefox open So we can close that and that should get us some yeah That took off quite a bit of memory usage there as well as like half the threads Oh firefox, what are we gonna do with you? That's crazy. Okay. Anyways, um most of what the memory the cpu usage looks like these resize targets Is it gonna be mostly the xorg stuff That is I'm going to I'm just very curious. I'm going to go ahead and restart this and um Check and see what the memory is When it's fresh because I'm very curious Because xfce is very light, right? That's the point of xfce Like I'm talking like what 600 megabytes is what it should use around there So we'll see what it is So free dash m Is using 602 that's exactly what it should That's exactly what it should that was a pretty good memory there matt that you remembered that anyways, so yeah, it's using xfc It's just as light as you'd expect it to be Uh and firefox still uses a ton of threads. Imagine that. Okay. So anyways, that is zero and os 16 light the free version and uh overall It's very good if you're switching from windows This would be a really good option for you because not only is the ui familiar But also the it has a ton of software in the software center Just a ton of selection and you don't ever have to worry about whether it's pulling from flat pack or snap or Zorn as long as the application that you're looking for is there chances are if you're a new user You're never going to notice that drop down at the top there the software center anyways You're just going to say hey, look steam is here install and it's going to install and you're going to go about Your married days of playing games and stuff. So I think this is a great new user distro um Whether or not it would be for me. I It would be fine. I could go through and make it my own, but I don't think that I'd ever keep those the The themes that it has it's just a little bit too flat for me and it's really especially you noticed in in LibreOffice how everything was just kind of like a flat pane and there's no definition to any of the buttons and stuff I don't want skewer morphism, but I also don't want complete flat I want to be able to see especially in like a dark or blinding white mode Some definition to the where you're supposed to click Should would be good. So I would change the themes, but that's not, you know Hard at all with xfc. You don't even have to install a tweak tool or anything You just go ahead and you know use the theme manager from xfc that is built in So that that is zero and a y16 light if you have thoughts on this distro You can leave those in the comment section below You can follow me on twitter at the Linux cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Sid a Devon Chris east coast web gen 2 is fun too Patrick L primus marcus maglen jackson actual Steve a mitchell art center mta smarrick camp jashly j dog the bsd is wrapped peter agon crucible Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time