While both Mint and Zorin are good “beginner” distros, they might not be the best choice for gaming. Since your primary use seems to be gaming and you’re on an nvidia GPU, you may also want to have a look at distros, that make it easier to set them up for that. So apart from Pop_OS you could also look at Nobara Linux or Bazzite. Not to confuse you with even more options, but it’s good to know what’s out there and try some stuff out to see what works.

My elderly mum and dad use Zorin and they have no issues. But their needs are simple, and they mainly need a simple, easy to use, and stable system. I wouldn’t recommend Zorin if you’re a gamer though, since it’s not really optimised for gaming, and it has outdated packages. Software in the Linux world moves really fast, so as a gamer you’d ideally want to always be on the latest graphic driver stack, latest Wine/Proton, latest kernel etc in order to get better compatibility with games and better performance. Zorin and most Ubuntu-based distros like Mint and Pop_OS generally lag behind on several key packages, which may not be ideal for a gamer.

If you want a daily-driver for gaming, I’d recommend checking out Nobara (based on Fedora), or Bazzite (based on Fedora uBlue). Both these distros come with all the drivers, codecs and optimized versions of Steam, to make gaming easier. Nobara has an added advantage of an optimized versions of the kernel, Proton, Discord and a few other apps, whereas Bazzite has the added advantage of atomic updates and an immutable filesystem, which increases stability and makes it easy to rollback an uodate, plus it can behave like SteamOS and boot directly into gamemode, which is great if you want to get a console-like experience.

I would say Nobara should be a good starting point. Once you’re a bit more familiar with Linux, you could check out Bazzite, because internally it works quite differently compared to traditional desktop operating systems.

I started out with zorin, i love it. I gamed on it a fair bit, it does help you run wine things by installing wine if you try to run anything windows so it might be good if you just switched. But I was looking for something minimal so I’m on KDE Neon now. I use bottles to run games and works amazing too.

I don’t have much to add here, since I mostly agree with the others.

I started with Zorin too (a few years ago) and back then it was great. It was almost the same as Mint, but looked more modern.

Nowadays, I would recommend Mint more than Zorin. Zorin isn’t bad, but isn’t maintained as much anymore.

There were lots of upgrades (performance, looks, functionality) in the underlying system (kernel, UI, etc.) which Zorin didn’t recieve. But it still isn’t a BAD choice, but there are better ones.

Mint is an example of that. It’s also very conservative (-> stable), but heavily maintained and improved. It isn’t a gaming distro, but every distro is suited for gaming anyway.

Use that for a while and see what you dislike.

Then switch to something like Fedora (or Nobara), Pop!OS, or Bazzite. The latter is definitely for more advanced users, since it’s a very new concept and not as spread. It’s more similar to SteamOS.

Don’t base your choice by “it’s a gaming distro”. That doesn’t matter much. You can install those tweaks pretty easily on everything else.

Your experience with Linux actually depends more on the desktop environment than the distro. The big 4 are called gnome, kde, cinnamon and xfce.

For users looking to migrate from windows, I always recommend kde. It’s slick, full-featured, comes with a good catalog of apps and (imho) is the most windows-like experience. Kde is going to function mostly the same regardless of the distro you pick.

I’m a long time slackware user. Slackware ships with kde by default but will have a much steeper learning curve than previously mentioned distros. But if you really want to learn Linux computing then maybe give it a try.

I have a… philosophical issue with Zorin. It is based on Ubuntu, which is fine, but then they charge for “Zorin Pro” which gives you access to different preconfigured desktop layouts that are provided using FOSS software. They’re doing nothing wrong from a licensing perspective or anything, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

I would say Linux Mint or even just Ubuntu are better recommendations for a solid beginner distro.

Zorin is based on Ubuntu LTS so it will be very stable and has tons of apps available. Steam should work just fine but I don’t think they’ve done any additional work to specially optimise it for gaming.

Linux Mint would be a very option because they tend to update the system more often than Zorin, although also Ubuntu LTS based, and I think Cinnamon looks better than Zorins desktop personally.

If you have Nvidia graphics then maybe look at Pop_OS because while they are also Ubuntu based, they’ve done some extra work with Nvidia drivers and getting them to play nice with Linux.

Unfortunately Nvidia doing supply open source drivers so everything has to be reversed engineered. That’s why Linux users tend to use AMD.

Zorin is a solid beginner Distro, and should work well for the tasks you listed.

If you’ve never used linux before, personally I would recommend Linux Mint Cinnamon edition, for the main reason being it has by far the nicest, most polished appstore of any distro, which I think is an important feature for new users.

However, Zorin has a cool feature with the ability to change the style of the interface to mimic other OS’s, and the default themes look cooler than Mint’s.

Both would serve you well. ExplainingComputers on youtube does a good in depth video on both distros.

Recommendations are only recommendations. Try the distros out yourself in a VM like VMware, configure it, spend some time in them, and see which you like the most. It should only take a few hours

If you can dualboot (know how to, also SSDs are cheap now), then just give it a go with whatever you think looks great (gotta admit, Zorin looks real smooth.) Then if anything goes wrong you at least have a backup OS.

I am new to linux as well and dualbooting gives a huge safety net and peace of mind. I just looked at Manjaro, thought it looked cool, installed it and learnt the basics, and I am on a different distro now.

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Something that hasn’t quite been touched upon but might be important to note is that both Zorin and Linux Mint run ‘old’ kernels (almost two years old in fact). While this does not necessarily have to affect you, there’s a considerable chance that you might not reap the benefit from improved performance and other good stuff that would be found on a newer kernel.

Generally speaking, you should be fine regardless. However, if you intend to primarily engage in high-fidelity gaming, then I’d argue it’s at least worth benchmarking your performances on Zorin and/or Linux Mint and compare that to a Fedora(-based distro; like Bazzite or Nobara) or an openSUSE Tumbleweed (or perhaps even an Arch(-based distro) if you’re feeling brave). If the differences are negligible, then you shouldn’t let this be a factor to take into consideration. But if it isn’t, then you might want to (at least) consider switching over to a distro with a newer kernel (eventually).

Finally, the ‘old’ kernel is -in a sense- one of the reasons why both Zorin and Linux Mint are even popularized for newer users. But, that’s something I won’t be able to go over in this comment for the sake of brevity.

You might want to know about discord updates, if the maintainers of the distribution don’t update discord as fast as the discord developper, it will fail to launch when major update happen since those don’t go through the internal updater of the client, and discord only provide a .deb package, which you can install with a simple double click on debian based distribution (ubuntu, mint, mx, zorin etc), and a generic linux exectuable, which can be launched in any distributions but won’t be automatically integrated in your application menus

nothing wrong with Zorin. If you game on steam and want a very windows like experience it will work. It was my running up when I went into Linux. The only reason I chose mint was mint had a bigger subreddit and I knew I would go there or tech support.

I installed Zorin on a computer for someone who hardly uses a computer, and it was easy for them to get the hang of navigating it. If you’re coming from windows, with not much Linux experience, it should be an easy transition. From what I remember, it’s based on Debian. I’ve read, enabling their testing repos is a good way to keep as up to date on packages as you can, while keeping it stable. Debian strives for stability, over the most recent updates of packages. Which could be good in your case (You can always install Flatpak to get the most up-to-date packages, too). I’m not sure how Zorin fairs for gaming. You may want to consider Pop!_OS, or even just straight Debian. yote_zip@pawb.social has some great material on how to get Debian working for gaming. Later on, you could move to Arch. I’ve heard great things about EndeavourOS. Arch is known for being bleeding-edge and having the most up-to-date packages but you may come across instances where you need to troubleshoot a bit more (their wiki has almost anything you could want to know, though). Almost everything will run on Linux. Check out Proton, Lutris, and Bottles. And, obviously, Steam and Discord work on Linux, so you’re good there.