Zorin OS on Dell Inspiron 6400: Switched to Linux Mint
 

This is just a FYI, not a cry for help or os-bashing post.

After reading and looking at (Youtube) some glowing recommendations about ZorinOS, I went ahead and installed the download version (the latest one, obviously) on my laptop.

Th notebook is an antique Dell Inspiron 6400, with 1 GB of RAM and a 120 GB HDD. The video 'card' is the Intel one, not ATI, and the WiFi didn't work anyway, so the laptop is on wired net only.

Zorin worked nicely from the beginning, albeit a bit slowly on occasion (which I expected, naturally) and particularly video playback over a networked share was choppy and not useable (not a big deal, since that was not what the machine was going to be used for anyway).

This might be a good time to confess that this was the first time I installed a Linux desktop distribution in almost 10 years. I grew up with MS-DOS and later IBM's excellent OS/2, but switched to S.u.S.E. linux (Yes, they used periods back in the nineties) until moving particularities left me with only a Windows XP tablet pc. So I'm kinda behind on the linux scene, but mostly jaw-droppingly amazed at how far it has come.

So, ZorinOS... It worked fine, until I accepted to install a system update which wreacked mild havoc on my display. There seemed to be some interference between the mouse input (both with the trackpad and with my Logitec Trackman M570 and no: disabling the trackman did not change things).

I tinkered with the problem for a few days and then decided, as I am still in the distro testing fase, to run Linux Mint Sylvia (MATE-edition), just to see if it might be a hardware problem on this antediluvian machine.

Well, it was an eye-opener! Not only did Mint not have any problems with the display, it actually seemed to run a #INSERT_PREFERRED_NETHERWORLD# of a lot faster than Zorin. Add to that that video playback (using the same VLC and network share) is flawless and that the default software repository appears to contain a lot more stuff, made the decision rather easy: As of now, Zorin is no more on my laptop and Linux Mint has taken over the hard drive.

The only downside might be the Mint's Wine is quite antique, compared to Zorin's, but running Windows software on Linux was not my priority anyway.

I hope this did not come over as a rant, but as what it was intended to be: an evaluation by a relative newbie, based on limited runtime and comparative aggravation levels.