 XorinOS is one of those Linux distributions that points it towards as suitable for brand new Linux users. And I think that's one of the reasons why I've never actually given it much of a try. Now I think I've installed it like maybe one time a couple of years ago. I don't really remember. I didn't stay on it for very long. But mostly because it's been a long time since I've been a new Linux user now, at least a new Linux user in terms of like, actually a new Linux user instead of just being a perpetual noob, which is what I proclaimed myself to be. So recently, Xorin has released their brand new XorinOS 16 beta. So I thought today we'd take a look at that and see what's new and see what XorinOS is all about. So let's go ahead and jump in. So the first thing we're going to do is take a look at the announcement. The first thing it says it has is a stunning new look. Now I won't be able to judge whether or not this is actually a new look because I have no clue what it really looked like before, but I will say that from the pictures, at least it looks like it's really pretty. Now, one of the things that a lot of people enjoy about like deep end is that it is different than other operating systems or other distros, I should say, in that it focuses a lot more on aesthetics, things like Ubuntu and even just GNOME itself and KDE even. They're more focused on functionality than they are in terms of making things look super pretty. So you could say distros like Xorin and deep end both kind of go by the Apple philosophy of design. They want to go through and make sure everything looks super pretty. So XorinOS 16 has a refreshed design with revamped and refined appearance out of the box. We've introduced a new more polished default theme that's easier on the eyes. You'll find detailed touches and delightful animations throughout the system that elevate your computing experience. So I will just put this on the record. I don't think animations will ever quote elevate your computing experience. For the most part, I think animations are a complete waste of computing resources, but people like them. So whatever. So there's some new wallpapers, new lock screen. This just basically looks like the new GNOME lock screen. Faster and smoother performance. We'll see about that. I don't know. Like I said, I can't compare it, but we'll see if it's fast. A larger Apple upgrade because FlatHub is now included in the store itself. So Xorin supports FlatHub Snap and the Ubuntu and XorinOS app repositories out of the box. It seems to be one of those distros that is actually supporting both flat packs and snaps directly out of the box. There's not too many of those because like so Ubuntu itself supports snaps out of the box, but doesn't support flat packs out of the box. You have to install it. Mint is the opposite of the way around. And I mean, there's several other ones that are either choose one side or the other. Xorin seems to have chosen both. And that's kind of cool. And it's definitely different than like I said, but other distribution seems to have done. The built-in software store has also received many under the hood optimizations as well as user interface improvements to make it even easier to find and install apps from different sources. So I believe they're just going to be using the, you know, software center to do this. We'll find out. So there's a new getting started easier with a tour. I will admit when I first installed, I did not see this. So I might have to actually see if that shows up this next time. Navigate quicker with touchpad gestures. So that won't be anything I'll be able to test because I don't have a touchpad. But one of the things that many likes distributions are doing now is really focusing on the touchpad gestures. I know elementary OS 6 is planning on doing that. I know that Fedora just recently had something that did better with the gestures. I'm pretty sure Ubuntu also just had something that came out when 21.04 that worked way better with the gestures. So this isn't a surprise. It's also nice to see a new sound recorder app because awesome, more customizable taskbar, a redesigned Zoran appearance. So from what I know, Zoran appearance seems to be a fork of like GNOME tweak tools, only with the extensions ability pulled out. So I'll talk more about the extensions thing when we get to there. We'll also look at the different layouts they have. They also have a new Windows 10 X like desktop layout that is apparently coming soon. I'm not sure how I feel about all this white space over here. I'm just saying jelly mode undoubtedly the most gone wrong breaking and revolutionary feature we've ever included jelly mode will fundamentally change how you use your computer forever. So they've introduced wobbly windows. I'm pretty sure that was in Linux forever. So I mean obviously they were being sarcastic up there, which is nice that they have a sense of humor at least. Other improvements fractional scaling for high resolution displays, star files easily. So that's going to be something that comes with the GNOME files app. So a Nautilus better fingerprint reader support unread message badges and progress bars for taskbar icons. Display QR code for easily connect your devices via Wi Fi. The settings app now has a refined category layout that's easier to navigate. Let's see you're based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This is going to be based on the last LTS that came out last year. So let's go ahead and jump in and install this. We're going to be installing this in virtual box. So we'll just make sure it's selected here and hit start. Get us into full screen. It's going to do its traditional checks. This is just something that normal distribution based on Ubuntu do since the 20.04 release custom logo at the startup. So that's cool. Nice animation. So we're just going to go ahead and install Zorn. This is the traditional Ubuntu installer. So this shouldn't be too much of a surprise here. There is this extra checkbox here. So that first of all, there doesn't seem to be a minimal install at all. So they've taken that part out. So you download updates, install third party software. We don't need to install updates. I'll do that after or I guess I usually do that after I should say there's also this thing here do not participate in the census. So basically what they do by default, they'll send the fact that you're installing Zorn back to their server so that they can kind of keep count of how many users they have. I'm going to check that so they don't send that information back because I'm not going to keep keeping this. No sense in padding their numbers. So we have no option here for a different version of the file system because this is despite this being Ubuntu, there's no option for what is it? ZFS? Is that what that's called? I think. And so that's interesting that they've taken that out. I'm not sure what they'll use. They'll probably just go ahead and use EXT4, but we'll check that out after install. So go ahead and install now continue. Oops, press the button. That works. And we'll type in our credentials here, call this Zorn VM and choose a strong password and press continue. And we'll just wait for this to install. Now I will cut the video away and bring it back once it's done. Okay, that took about four and a half, five minutes or so. Let's go ahead and hit the restart button and see if this will actually restart us or if I'll have to go through and actually remove the installation media from virtual box. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Looks like it's going to start up just fine. So we'll see how the startup times are like. Now, I will say just to put this out there that this is beta software. So we might see some bugs here and there. So we won't hold that against it at all. The startup times here was not horrible. So when signed in. So this is what Zorn OS looks like out of the box. Zorn OS 16. Now I will say that that blog post we looked at told us that there was a new tour or something, a new welcome app or something like that. I don't see it. So whether that's because this is a beta software or just that's not what they do, I don't know. So there doesn't seem to be a welcome app. So let's actually see if we actually first let's go to the terminal. I always seem to forget to do this first. So zoom in here and do first or do free dash M. And out of the box, we're using almost a whole gigabyte of RAM. That is gnom for you. That is quite a lot in terms of resources out of the box with nothing running. So this is definitely not an app desktop environment slash distro that you'd want to use on lower high and how to right now. Zorn OS does have a light version that uses X FCE instead of GNOME. So if you're interested, let me know in the comments. And maybe I'll take a look at Zorn OS light as well. So let's take a look at the kernel. So they're using 5.8 which is quite old. But not the oldest I've seen. So you 5.4 was the release or the LTS before that. So this is not I don't I'm pretty positive that 5.8 is not an LTS release. I think I went 5.4 than 5.10. If I'm remembering right but either way, it's not the most recent kernel, not the oldest kernel I've seen because a lot of the Debian based distros are still using 5.4. So that takes care of that. Let's go ahead and install Neo fetch and see what we get when we type that in. And I can't type worth a damn. All right. So we get a Zorn logo again 5.8. This is using GNOME with the mudder window manager. Window manager theme is Zorn blue light, Zorn blue light for the theme and icons as well. This is the GNOME terminal. So let's go ahead and look up here. This is going on turtle terminal 3.36. So even the GNOME version of some of the applications is fairly outdated. So that's definitely something you're going to keep to keep in mind. No, it's not a huge deal because right remember, this is being focused towards new users, new Linux users don't really care that they don't have the most recent version of GNOME. And honestly, it's really not at all surprising that the GNOME 40 stuff isn't here because Zorn is focused on doing their own things with UI elements and stuff. So they're not really going to care about the whole revamped GNOME UI that they've released recently. Alright, so let's go ahead and close this. We can not do that. We don't do that. Do that now. Alright, so because there's not a welcome app, but we can go and search and see if there's a welcome app. Here's the tour. Okay. Why this doesn't show up like to begin with I don't know. So let's go ahead and take a tour. Now, you probably won't be able to hear it, but there's some sound effects going on here. And it's very choppy, whether that's because of the VM I'm in or not. I don't know. But let's go ahead and start the tour. So open the menu to launch apps. Okay, I'm pretty sure we can get that next. Choose your desktop. Look with Zorn appearance. So let's go ahead and launch this. We'll look at that now. And like I said, I'm pretty sure this is a fourth version of GNOME tweaks. And the reason why I say that is because a lot of this stuff looks familiar. So if we look here, like there's this part here looks almost precisely like what you'd see in GNOME tweaks with some added things from Zorn. Same thing with this part here. This looks like you get from GNOME tweaks as well. So they have four different layouts here. They have this more traditional, like Windows style layout, and they have like a minimal, a smaller version of that same because this is basically the same just with a smaller bar. They have this one here that's a little bit bigger. And this is more traditional GNOME. So this looks more like what you'd expect with GNOME but with dash to dock at the bottom. And then they have this one here, which is basically a this is basically GNOME as well. That more is more in style with traditional GNOME without the dash to dock stuff. Okay, so we can just go back to this one here. The themes that they have installed the Zorn stuff you can do dark themes, which is what I think they probably should do by default because dark dark themes are always better than they have some accent colors here as well. We'll choose red because why not. And then and the other installed they have at a watt at a weight and high contrast. That's all they have in terms of themes. And then off any extra icon sets as well just high color and high contrast for accessibility reasons, and nothing for the shell either. So you'd have to install those separately, probably through the terminal, because that's usually the way you have to because like I said, there's no probably through the terminal, because you don't have any access to extensions or anything like that here as far as I can tell now, GNOME comes with a application separate for extensions. But as far as I can tell, that's not actually here. So we type in extensions, you don't get anything like that. Now I'm assuming you could probably install that if you wanted to install some extensions. But again, this is focused on new users. So they're probably not going to be focusing on that like at all. The fact that they even include something that is like a paired down version of GNOME tweak tool is actually an advancement on what actual GNOME does because actual GNOME you can't do any of this stuff out of the box. So let's go ahead and get rid of this. We'll go back to the white version here and just do this. Yeah, it's weird that the accent color changes the color of the window itself, but not a big deal. All right, let's go ahead and hit next. So speed up your virtual machine Zoranus has detected that you're using a virtual machine to improve performance, install the extensions for your virtualization software and restart the system. So this is basically just so you can install guest additions. I don't need to do that. But that's cool that they offer. Connect your online accounts. That's something that you're going to usually offer you to do. Link your phone and your computer with Zoran Connect, which is just going to be a fork of GS Connect, I believe is what it's called. The fact that they've rebranded it is, you know, not surprising. And use software to finance all apps. We'll look at the software center here in a few minutes. Office suite for work. So it comes with a library office installed you can it also still gives you an option to install only office. I used only office for the first time the other night is God awful. This is so bad. It's not as bad as WPS because WPS doesn't think doesn't actually support ODT, but that's a rabbit hole for another time. Let's go ahead and hit next. That's it. We hope that you enjoy Zoran OS. So that's not the it's a neat tour, but it's, you know, not groundbreaking or anything. So that does give you a link here to go to a help page in case you need help. So again, focused on new users. So that's not a horrible tour experience at all. So let's go ahead and take a look at the software center. Now, I installed this one before off camera just to make sure that I could get it installed on virtual box because I just installed virtual box again after I hopped. So when I installed when I clicked the software center, I got something really surprising. So let's see if it does it again. Yeah, that's just incredible. So if you know anything about the GNOME software center, which is what this is, I'm sure it is. It looks exactly the same, right? Maybe it's a fork of it, but still, you know that the GNOME software center, especially the ones that are built using the snap version of it are slow. I mean, they're just so slow to launch at least, right? You click on the app and it takes 35, 40, 50, maybe a whole minute just to launch. This was instantaneous. That's just incorrect. I was just blown out of my socks because it's awesome. I mean, literally, I had no socks on anymore. Anyway, so let's go ahead and go shopping. So basically, I believe that you said this is just the GNOME software center. So if you type this is just software, yep. But it's like, it's not going to be the snap version that Ubuntu uses. So it's just going to probably be the regular old GNOME software that they used to use. And really, this is pretty great. And it seems to be pretty fast. And there's got this drop down here where you can actually choose which you'd whether you install this from the snap store has several versions you can use because snap does versioning a lot better. You can also download it from the Zorn repositories or flat out. So that's just great. Now, I haven't used a GNOME software that actually has that functionality to allow you to install from different places before. But if I remember right, it's in like a drop down box in other versions of this. The fact that they put this front and center is really awesome. Now, like I said, that might be somewhere that might be used elsewhere to and I just don't remember. But that's pretty great. Being aimed towards new users that might confuse some people. But I think for people who actually know what they're doing, that's pretty great. So we can just go ahead and close this. Now, the next thing we can do is go through and take a look at some of the apps. So we'll start with accessories. We have clocks, files, maps. These are going to be basically GNOME software applications about maps. Yep. GNOME maps. So we're expecting a lot of the GNOME stuff here. Text editor to do. This is probably GNOME to do, right? I forget GNOME to do doesn't actually have a drop down for the about. That's okay. Whether games coming installed, we have Solitaire, Mahjong, Mines. I'm pretty sure that this is basically I don't know what that is. What is that? I've never heard of that game before. What do you do? We got to put play. Oh, this is it's Tetris. Okay. I wonder how you rotate pieces. We're gonna play some Tetris. Okay. So you rotate pieces by up and down buttons or the up button or up arrow, I should say. This is really what you wanted to do. You tuned in to watch me play Tetris, right? Oops. I'm really bad at Tetris. All right. We can stop this. Close that. Anyway, that's cool. What else we got here? Game terms of games. So do okay. So just the basic games. Graphics, we have GEMP installed by default. We have photos, which is this is GNOME photos. Is that possible what this is? Oops. This is what I was looking for. Yeah, this is GNOME 40s, but it's an old version of GNOME photos, 3.34. It's even older than the rest of the software. We also have the LibreOfficeDraw and image viewer here. So in the internet, we have Firefox and a remote desktop tool. Okay. Office. This is LibreOffice. Nothing special here. The calendar is going to be GNOME calendar, probably GNOME contacts as well. Sound and video. We have Becero, Cheese and of PTV. I've never heard of that before. This is a video editor. Well, we're going to have to get out of try someday. I've been looking for a new video editor. I can tell you that I don't like that accent color. So when we get to GNOME and parents, we're going to change that. So let's see here. We got rhythm box for music, sound recorder, and videos. That's going to be probably GNOME videos. System tools. This is going to be the traditional system stuff here. Nothing special. Tours or an appearance, we're going to change that accent color. We just really do have to do that. Really, you can't not have an accent color. So okay. Yeah, that blues way better than the red. Okay. So utilities. GNOME disks is here. The disk uses analyzer. Nothing out of the ordinary here. Like we were in GNOME terminal before. So those are the applications that are installed in terms of looks and feels. So let's take a look at. So like this is Nautilus here. And it is pretty. This whole system here is very pretty. Now, I don't get any of the fancy effects because I don't have that enabled in virtual box. But apparently there are a lot of animations and stuff that enhance your user, your computer experience. We all know how I feel about that. But if you're using this on hardware, you probably get access to that as well. In terms of like I said, appearance, this is really great. I mean, it's just very pretty for new users. A lot of times, aesthetics matter more than functionality because they want you to think that this is as close to a Windows experience as you can get. Now, I'm not going to say that this is the most Windows experience I've ever seen. I personally think that XFC does a way better job of mimicking Windows than GNOME does because GNOME has some just some weird things that it does that Windows doesn't do. So, you know, it's just those little things that GNOME puts in the little aesthetics tweaks and stuff that kind of differentiates it from Windows. Now, like I said, XFC on the other hand, I think, like said, just does a better job of mimicking Windows if it's styled correctly. So maybe I will take a look at the Zorn light thing someday. Anyways, that is Zorn OS 16 beta. We didn't go through all the new features and stuff, but I can't really go through and tell you, hey, this is what's new. And this is how it's new and tell you any, you know, in my experience, how it's changed because I didn't use it before. So when the 17th version comes out, I'll at least be able to compare them. But for now, it's a just a decently styled version of GNOME is the way I put it. I think it's probably a good thing, a good distro for new users, because it's basically a boon too, but prettier, because let's face it, a boon too is getting a little stale. But so if you're into a distribution that uses a boon too, but looks pretty, Zorn is definitely something that you should check out. So thank you for watching. 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