 In the last few weeks I've been getting people asking me to take a look at Zoran OS because Zoran OS is a desktop Linux distribution that has some popularity. It ranks rather high in Distro Watch's page hit rankings, which Distro Watch rankings don't mean anything. They're not a real metric of how many people actually use something. I mean, according to Distro Watch, Zoran OS is much more popular of a Linux distribution than Arch Linux, which we all know that's ridiculous, right? How many people have you come across in real life that were running Zoran OS, right? You've never met that person, but how many people in real life do you know running Arch Linux? Yeah, millions, right? So, Distro Watch rankings don't necessarily mean anything, but people are interested in Zoran OS, especially when it comes to a Linux distribution that's new user friendly and is very attractive to potential new users switching from Windows or Mac OS, and that's kind of the niche that Zoran feels. So I'm going to go to the Zoran website and grab their latest ISO. So this is Zoran.com and if I go to the download button, I notice that they have a free version and a paid version. So the paid version is $39 and that excludes sales tax and that's for Zoran OS 16.1 Pro. And what does that come with? I'm sure mainly you're paying for support. So you get some extra support from the Zoran OS team if you pay for the distribution. I don't mind that. We get some premium desktop layouts, so a little more artwork and things like that. They do offer a free version and sometimes I'll actually pay for the paid versions for these first look and impression kind of reviews, but today I think I'm just actually going to grab one of the free editions. So they have the core edition here. If I click on that, what is the core? For basic use on modern computers. So that's what I'm going to go ahead and download. So I've spun up a virtual machine here to take a look at Zoran OS 16.1. This is the core edition and I'm going to choose try or install Zoran OS from the boot menu here. And it's running this familiar checking MD5 sum screen. You guys have ever run Ubuntu live USB sticks, things like that. You've seen this screen before, so Zoran is based on Ubuntu. I actually didn't check before doing this video, but it's obvious that this is Ubuntu-based. And we launched directly into our live environment, which I believe is a customized version of the GNOME desktop environment, and it immediately gives us our installer. And I'm assuming this is the Ubiquiti installer, the standard Ubuntu installer. We have two options to start with. We want to try Zoran OS, so I'm assuming that would close the installer and we could play around in the live environment without actually installing it, or we could go ahead and run through an installation. I'm going to run through an installation. First we need to select our keyboard layout. The default is English US, which is correct for me, so I'm going to click continue. And then updates and other software. Do we want to download updates while installing Zoran OS? Sure. I think this ISO is a couple of months old, so it'd be good to go ahead and have it update. We're going to install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware and additional media formats. Yes, you want to make sure you always tick that on any time you're installing Ubuntu and our Ubuntu derivative. You need, especially the Wi-Fi drivers, if you're on a laptop, you also need these multimedia codecs for a good video playback experience. And then there's also this option here. Do you want to not participate in the census? So I guess we have to opt out of some kind of telemetry. You notice it's worded, don't participate in the census. So I'd have to tick that on, not to participate. I actually don't mind participating in these sorts of telemetry things as long as they're up front and letting you know exactly what they're collecting and things like that. Sure. I'm going to click continue. Now the installation type, do we want to erase the disk and give the entire virtual hard drive of this virtual machine to Zoran OS? That's what I'm going to do. Before we could use something else and that would be going through and doing some manual partitioning yourself. I'm just going to go ahead and erase the disk and let Zoran have the whole disk. So I'm going to click the button installed now. And then we get this warning saying that it's about to format the drive and right to the disk. I'm going to click continue. And now we choose our time zone. It has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me. So I'm just going to click continue. Then we need to create our username. So I'm going to call my user DT. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for the DT user. And then repeat that strong and complicated password. And then do we want to log in automatically? No. I like having to enter a password to get into my desktop because for privacy, right? You don't want anybody just to be able to access your computer, right? You should always have to enter a password to get in. You also have the option of use active directory. I won't tick that on. So I'm just going to click continue. And now Zoran OS will continue to install. This typically takes about five to 10 minutes on my hardware. So I'll be back once this installation has completed. And the installation completed that took about 10 or 12 minutes. And it says installation is complete. You need to restart the computer in order to use your new installation. So I'm going to click restart now. And we get our login menu. So let me go ahead and click on my username DT and let's enter our strong and complicated password. Oh, we get a startup sound. It's a really, really long startup sound, but I do appreciate that they have the login sound. And then we get our welcome screen. Do we want to start a tour? So tell us a little bit about the feature. So looks like we get a little slideshow here. I'm actually not going to take the time to read it. It doesn't look like it's too detailed on information anyway. So that was the little welcome app. So let's see what applications are installed out of the box here in the core edition. So let's break it down by category. I'm going to go into accessories. We have GNOME clocks. We have GNOME files. That is the Nautilus file manager. And if we go GNOME maps here, this is the mapping utility. And it's using some geolocation information here to pinpoint exactly where I am. If I zoomed in, it would actually tell you exactly where I am. So I don't think I'm going to zoom in on that. But let's go to about, this is maps 3.38.2. Let's close out that. And go back into the menu, into accessories. Our text editor, of course, is GNOME's plain text editor called gEdit. This is gEdit 3.36.2. Close that out. gEdit is a fine little plain text editor. Not much to it, but it's really got everything most people will need for a plain text editor. We have the to-do application. We have GNOME weather, which is a really neat little weather app. I won't open it because it's going to use geolocation information again when I open it. It's going to pinpoint exactly where I'm at in the world, and it's going to tell me my five-day forecast. Under the games category, we have All Riot Solitaire. So this is just a standard little card game, right? Actually, there's a variety of card games associated with this one program I go to about. This is All Riot 3.32.9, a standard little GTK game here. And we also have Majang, Mines, Quadrapessel, and Sudoku. Under the graphics category, we have GIMP. Let's see what version of GIMP we're on here. If I go to Help and About, this is GIMP 2.10.18. GIMP is a fantastic free and open source alternative to something like Adobe Photoshop. GIMP is actually what I use to create all of my YouTube thumbnails, the channel header, all the artwork associated with my channel. I do everything using GIMP. Also under graphics, we have our image viewer. We have LibreOfficeDraw, and we have Photos. Click on Photos. This is another standard GNOME application, and this is Photos 3.34.1. It's just a little simple photo-managing application. Under Internet, we have Firefox as our default web browser. Let's see what version of Firefox we're on. I'm assuming it would always be the latest version, even though it's running based on Ubuntu. For a web browser, security is important. Security updates are important, so I would think that you would always be on the absolute latest Firefox 97.0.2. Now that is actually not the absolute latest version of Firefox, because Firefox is on version 102. At least it is on my Arch Linux-based system that I run on my workstation here. Also under Internet, we have Remina. That is a remote desktop application. Basically, this is a little GUI program that can manage things like SSH connections. If you're constantly remoting into a remote web server or something like that, Remina is neat, especially if you have multiple machines that you remote into. It's a nice little way to organize them. Under the Office category, we have Calendar, Contacts, Evolution, Evolution is one of the standard email applications for Linux. Evolution is probably one of the better email clients for Linux, so that's nice to see that they're using that. Also under Office, we had the LibreOffice suite. We had Calc, Draw, Impress, and Writer. Under the Sound and Video category, we have Bracero, which is GNOME's disk-burning utility. Now that's interesting because these days, even though it is a GNOME application, most Linux distributions usually don't ship Bracero because who burns the disk anymore? Well actually, I do. I still burn CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, but still it's strange to see Linux distributions still shipping disk-burning utilities out of the box. We have Cheese, which is our webcam application, Petivi, which is GNOME's video editor. And I've actually used Petivi a little bit in the past. It is a very plain Jane video editor, but it works. If you're just making simple cuts, you know, it works for what it is. It's not a good video editor. It's nowhere near the best free and open source video editor. There's several that are better than that. They're shipping Petivi because it's part of the GNOME suite of applications, but really if you're going to ship a video editor, I would ship something much better than Petivi. Rhythm Box though is a fantastic audio player. One of the best music players out there for Linux. Let's see what version of Rhythm Box they're on. This is Rhythm Box 3.4.4. Rhythm Box can handle large catalogs, large libraries of music, and of course it can do some streaming as well. So under Sound and Video we have a sound recorder, and that just, you hit a button and it records your microphone. Very simple little application, not much to it. Videos is just GNOME's video player here. And if I go to Help, I was going to see what version we're on. Do I not get any kind of version information about this application? I guess I don't. I don't know too much about GNOME's video player, though I typically either use MPV or VLC as my video players, regardless of what Linux distribution or what desktop environment or window manager I'm using. Under System Tools we have additional drivers, that's to get your proprietary graphics drivers and Wi-Fi drivers. Remember though, during the installation I ticked on to install that stuff, but if I hadn't, I would click this program and it would install that stuff for us. Then we have a main menu, which I'm assuming would edit items in this menu. We have our Settings Manager. We have Software, which is really what I was looking for. Let's actually check out our Software Center here. If I go into the little hamburger menu here, clicking on it, it's not doing anything out because this window is up. Let's go Shopping, I guess I have to get rid of that first. And then about Software, so this is GNOME's Software Center. So GNOME Software 3.36.1 is the version. And right off the bat I notice they've got some editor picks here, I guess some of the top-rated apps. Some of them get cracking, I know it's proprietary software. So I wonder how they're installing that. They're installing that as a snap, so that's really cool. So they already have snaps integrated. So let me search for some other proprietary applications I know people would probably want. So let's search for Discord, because I know Discord is available as a snap and as a flat pack. Did I not hit Enter? Maybe just the internet is slow, or maybe it's just taking a long time to sink. Yeah, I'm not sure why that search was taking so long there. Let's try that one more time, no. Let me try something just in the standard repo. It finally popped up. Let me go back. I saw the screen pop up. Yeah, that was weird the very first time. That could have just been a me problem. Maybe there for a few seconds the network crapped out or something. But it looks like it's working now. If I click on Discord, and I click on Install, does it actually tell me what it's going to install it from? It looks like it's going to install it from FlatHub because it gets made the source. So it's installing Discord as a flat pack. So we've got snaps and flat packs, and of course your standard Debian packages from the apt package manager here as well, all inside this one store. That is really, really neat. I'm going to go ahead and cancel that download though and close that out. Now I'm going to go ahead and do Control Alt T to see if we can bring up a terminal. We can. And let me go ahead and see if I can zoom in. I'm going to do a uname dash R. Let's see what kernel version we're on. We're on 5.13. If I do an apt list space dash dash installed, we'll get a list of all the applications installed out of the box that were installed through the apt package manager by up arrow to get that command back. This time I'm going to pipe that through WC, the word count program, space dash L for a line count, because I want a line count. I really don't want a word count. And 1,869 lines were in that output, which means there's 1,869 packages installed through the apt package manager. It is Htop installed. Htop is not. How about let's sudo apt install Htop. Give it our strong and complicated password. And now that Htop is installed. Let's check out system resource usage. We're using 930 megs of the 6 gigs of RAM that I gave this virtual machine. That's pretty standard for the GNOME desktop environment. Let me quit out of Htop. And actually, let me go ahead and quit out of the terminal here. Because the one thing I really want to check out is the settings. Because I know that we have some different things we can do with appearance. So let me get back into the settings here. We've got background here, of course, for setting the various wallpapers and their wallpaper pack. I will say, and it looks really good. That is a gorgeous photograph, especially how it's a little darker than this very silvery light GTK theme they're using. That actually works perfectly. So I could definitely get down with something like that. Some of these wallpapers, I believe, are just part of the standard GNOME pack. I think I've seen that one before. I'm pretty sure I have. I'm going to go back to this one here, that lighthouse picture. That's nice. I know that we can change the theme as far as the panel placement and things like that. But I don't know where that is here. I thought it would be somewhere at the top. Because they're not like an appearance kind of thing. I don't know. Maybe if I just hit super to go back to the menu, a Zorn appearance. Maybe it's its own separate application. I guess it is. So it's separate from the settings manager. And by default, the layout is, of course, the traditional Windows 7 layout, which I think most new to Linux users, especially those coming from Windows, will appreciate the default layout. They probably wouldn't want to change it, but they have some other ones here. If I click on it, it's just a one-click switch. And yeah, that was very minor the changes. But you can see the panel gets a little smaller other than that. That's really... Is the menu system any different? No. Very subtle change, almost no change at all. And then this one here, I believe, just changes it more into almost like a Windows 11 layout because your taskbar now is a centered taskbar. But when you hit the menu system, you get your traditional kind of GNOME dash thing going. And then this fourth one looks like it is basically just GNOME. So standard GNOME shell panel at the top. If I hit super, we get our dash that appears on the left side. So that's just a traditional GNOME layout, not much to see there. For me, I'll be honest, I kind of like this third one here with the centered taskbar and everything. I think that that's a rather unique look. I also like that the menu system on this is a traditional GNOME menu system here where everything is just in one big category where I could cycle through all of the applications. I don't like fumbling around with those traditional menu systems much anymore. Now, one thing I don't like is I don't really like light themes. So can I do search for themes? Yeah, let's go back to Zorn appearance because other than the layout, let's go to theme and let's choose background dark. That's kind of a weird name to assign that background dark. You would think it would be like a theme dark or mode dark because background backgrounds usually synonymous for wallpapers. I mean, I kind of figured what that was going to do. But still, that's a strange wording there for an accent color. Let's do some orange to go with our purple because, you know, I'm a big fan of a boot to, I guess, purple and orange seems to be the colors we're going with today. Yeah, I like the changes, the accent colors, not just for the GTK applications, but also the icon set as well. That is really cool. So if I went to green, yeah. I think I'm just going to go with the purple here. Under interface, this is just some more settings so we can toggle on and off animations. I'm assuming is that for animations when we show and hide or minimize and unminimize things like that. And we have a little cog wheel for test bar settings. So is this where we can, yeah, okay, so we can change like the default size of the panel. Very cool. I was wondering if that was configurable or not. I kind of like the 40 pixels there. We could also turn on IntelliHide and I actually like that because really most of the time do you really need to see the panel. So IntelliHide means the panel will get out of the way when an application, you know, hovers over it. So, or if I maximize it, right, it takes up the full amount of the screen. So we get that extra 40 pixels at the bottom of the screen because I don't really need the test bar if I'm just doing something and one maximized application, for example, like a full screen web browser. So that's a really nice touch as well. Overall, I'm very impressed with this latest release of Zoran OS. I'm glad I took a look at it. People had been pestering me because it's been like three or four years since they took a look at Zoran on the channel. They're like, hey man, have you forgot about Zoran? You're making all these videos about people needing to switch from Windows over to Linux. You're showing them all these other beginner friendly Linux distributions. But Zoran OS is probably the best one. You should really be pushing that to people. And honestly, after taking a look at this latest Zoran OS, they're probably right. I think a lot of especially Windows users would be very comfortable in Zoran OS. And I think it's one that I probably should be promoting a little more. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode, Dustin Gabe, James Matt, Maxim, Michael, Mitchell, Paul West, Moina, Ball, Homie, Allen, Armoredragon, Chuck, Commander, Ingrid, Iokai, Dylan, Maristrom, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch, Invador, Polytech, Realitites4less, Red Prophet, Steven, ToolsDevlar, and Willy, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Zoran OS would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I depend on you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux, free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. That's certainly one of the best GNOME desktops I've seen lately.