this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
1307 points (96.5% liked)
Technology
77072 readers
2586 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Eli5 zorin...
Zorin OS is a Linux distro. Linux distros are different Linux-based operating systems. Kinda comparable to how Samsung-Android looks and feels different than Pixel-Android or Amazon-Android (aka FireOS). All of these are distributions of the same operating system.
The same exists with Desktop Linux, but the distros differ more than the Android distros differ.
With that out of the way: Zorin OS is a Linux Distro that is focussed on people migrating from Windows. The user interface looks a lot like Windows, it's setup with Wine (a tool that lets you run most Windows programs on Linux) out-of-the-box.
It's a quite decent starting point for someone migrating from Windows to Linux and it's a commonly recommended "beginners' distro".
I've never had much luck with Wine running Windows programs, unless the programs were ancient. Maybe I'm just unlucky?
At this point, any programs that won't work in Wine either have a component that cannot be run in Linux (kernel level anti-cheat for example) or has a DRM/execution stack that enforces Windows use (ie Abobe.) Most of my Windows emulation is gaming, and I've managed to get Fitgirl installers and even cracks/updates to run through Wine and Proton. My opinion only: At this point any program that won't run on Linux is intentional, either by design, or by neglect.
This is pretty accurate. Wine (and really Proton) have gotten very good recently. Most software that isn't actively hostile to Linux users will work.
Yes, exactly. My issues are with the Adobe suite, Affinity and Microsoft Office.
Yup, Adobe and Microsoft def a no-go. Especially Outlook.
For MS, the o365 web apps work as fine as they do on windows. Outlook is nearly at parity with the windows app. (I think they're slowly making the windows apps web under the hood)
Adobe has to be pre creativecloud
You can run a windows VM, then use remote-desktop but it completely defeats the purpose unless you're just trying to edge into privacy.
It really depends a lot on what programs you are running, what exact version of Wine/Proton/... you are running and how it's configured.
Wine is finnicky, but it can totally also just be bad luck, depending on what you try to run. Wine on x86 works quite well for me. x64 has issues more frequently, and combining it with Box86 to run it on ARM is more miss than hit.
Also, Wine is advancing pretty fast, so stuff that didn't work a while ago might work now.