I think Zorin’s approach makes sense for people who don’t want to learn a new interface and don’t have a lot of technical experience. GNOME does generally already have a good interface, but I think a lot of non-technical people wouldn’t understand (or want to understand) stuff like shell extensions and GNOME tweaks.
I don’t think I would switch to it anytime soon, but I could imagine it being used in a university.
I think Debian is close to new user friendly IF they pick Gnome or KDE with all the default stuff there, and has getting closer with non-free firmware enabled by default now, but still isn’t quite there as a plug and play new user friendly distro. Things like flatpak w/flathub or snap out of the box isn’t there, and it’d be hard to get a full Debian setup without using the command line (especially for a non free software zelot who wants Spotify and discord out of the box)
Something like mint is just a tad easier, and that might be the different between an easy install and an unexpected set of hiccups that a new user might struggle with. The mint installer is also a lot more intuitive, at the cost of being less universally compatible (a big goal of Debian).
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Debian is hard to master for someone coming from Windows ^^
Plus, it’s pretty ugly without heavy customisation. Which ZorinOS (or Pop!_OS) ain’t :)
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I think Zorin’s approach makes sense for people who don’t want to learn a new interface and don’t have a lot of technical experience. GNOME does generally already have a good interface, but I think a lot of non-technical people wouldn’t understand (or want to understand) stuff like shell extensions and GNOME tweaks.
I don’t think I would switch to it anytime soon, but I could imagine it being used in a university.
I think Debian is close to new user friendly IF they pick Gnome or KDE with all the default stuff there, and has getting closer with non-free firmware enabled by default now, but still isn’t quite there as a plug and play new user friendly distro. Things like flatpak w/flathub or snap out of the box isn’t there, and it’d be hard to get a full Debian setup without using the command line (especially for a non free software zelot who wants Spotify and discord out of the box)
Something like mint is just a tad easier, and that might be the different between an easy install and an unexpected set of hiccups that a new user might struggle with. The mint installer is also a lot more intuitive, at the cost of being less universally compatible (a big goal of Debian).