After 6 months of development, Zorin OS has published the release of Linux-Distribution Zorin OS 17.3 based on the Ubuntu package base 22.04. The target audience of the distribution is novice users accustomed to working in Windows. To control the design, the distribution offers a special configurator that allows you to give the desktop the view inherent in various versions of Windows and MacOS, and the composition includes a selection of programs close to the programs that Windows users are accustomed to. The size of the bootable iso-image is 3.4 GB.
GNOME with a set of its own additions and a panel based on dash to panel and dash to Dock is used as the basis of desktop. To integrate the desktop with a smartphone, the application zorin connect (based on KDE Connect) is supplied. In addition to DEB format and Ubuntu repositories, the default support for Flatpak, Appimage and SNAP formats with the ability to install programs from the Flathub and Snap Store catalogs.
In the new version:
- The built-in database is expanded to determine the installers of popular Windows applications, covering more than 150 programs. Improved information about the presence of alternatives. For example, when you try to launch an installer of the Obsidian Windows version, a dialogue will be shown about the presence of Linux in the build repository, and when you try to install Adobe Acrobat Reader, it will be proposed to use Document Viewer.
- As a default web browser, instead of Firefox, Brave is involved. As the reason for the replacement, discontent is mentioned by a change in Mozilla policy. Brave was selected due to the presence of built-in blocking of advertising and trackers, protection against passive identification, built-in ability to work through
