nubae's Habari | Linux and Education

This certainly seems like an interesting release, seeing as it clearly caters to replace windows XP and/or Windows 7, by making an interface that seems almost identical to the latter.

In fact, when I put the operating system on a couple of notebooks and had family members and friends use it, they couldn't tell the difference, other than the Z on the left bottom corner. The programs work identically to anything on the mainstream operating systems, and wine as well as flash, adobe pdf and other non-free elements are already directly installed.

In a way, it was a step backward from my elitest perspective, but I can see its great for anyone trying to move from Windows due to the extravagant costs to a mostly free operating system, benefiting from the power of the at hand software which is absolutely obvious to install. This is probably even easier to use than OS X, even more simple than windows 7, but still has the most stable OS in the world running under the hood.

For the mainstream, and I don't mean to sound like an elitest, it is absolutely a great way for capturing a larger audience for Ubuntu, on which it is based, though you'd be hard pressed to realise this unless you start running some of the software update tools, ubuntu One, or some of the other ubuntu specific tools.

With the stabilty a Linux OS brings and the look and feel of the most common OSes of all time, Zorin definetly has a place in the operating system field, and I predict a lot of people beginning to use it.

That said, if you are used to tweaking every aspect of your OS and are a die hard Unix/Linux Guru this won't keep you interested for longer than 10-20 minutes. I do hope it brings people over from the dark side though, and into a world where open source is a word they may learn about, ease of use is evident, and the myths that Linux and Unix are only for nerds and technical people is dispelled at last. So I hope Zorin 5 has a long a prosporous life.

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