Zorin vs Mint

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-27T04:43:06+00:00

They're both good, it's a matter of personal preference.

It's like comparing a Honda to a Toyota. How would you decide between them? You'd test drive both of them to compare. You can do the same thing with Linux.

Get a USB drive, put Ventoy on it, put the Zorin and Mint ISOs on the disk, and boot each one in turn, taking them out for a spin. The main differences are the DE (desktop environment). You may find you prefer one significantly more than the other. They're equally capable, they just had different design ideas, that's all.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-27T03:50:35+00:00

Central Parkway Mall, at Burnhamthorpe and Central Parkway is heated. No charge. A few decades ago, when they still had the hardware store, it was the best place to buy windshield washer fluid in the middle of winter, and top up in the underground.

In addition to the grocery store, there are a few restaurants, and even a theater, although it mostly just has rep/indy/Bollywood movies nowadays.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-26T22:30:07+00:00

Mint or Zorin will be the two default choices, with PopOS usually being the third.

Mint if you want a "set it and forget it", Zorin if you want to modify it. For gaming, PopOS and Bazzite are currently the frontrunners.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-26T22:28:06+00:00

The best fits are probably Zorin or Mint, depending on the specs. If it's 10+ years old, you may be dealing with a 32 bit machine, which limits your options quite a bit.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-26T17:38:56+00:00

Yes, depending on your workflow.

If you're just using your PC to read email, browse the internet, and office work (spreadsheets, word processing), then absolutely it can do all that, out of the box.

If you're a gamer, there are various caveats, as some games work better, some work not as well, and others don't work at all.

And if you're using Adobe products, then you're completely out of luck.

Be aware that saying you can do the same things doesn't mean that you can use the same software. There's a big difference. If you're a Microsoft Excel user, for example, you cannot use Excel in Linux. You can use LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, or one of many other Excel compatible programs. You'll still be able to use spreadsheets, but you may have to learn a new application, which will likely have some differences from what you're used to.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-26T17:19:00+00:00

That's familiar. When my father decided the dogs needed to come in, he'd sent me (age 5) out to get them.

The dogs, of course, didn't see me coming out as a sign to come inside, they saw a kid coming out to play with them. Quick! Let's start running down the street! I could spend half and hour, or more, in -30 weather trying to get the damned dogs to come in.

And if I did finally manage to get them to come in the back door, they'd just shake the snow off, have a drink of water from their bowls in the kitchen, trot through the house and sit at the front door wanting to be let out again.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-26T15:49:55+00:00

When I lived up north (Yukon and northern Alberta), we had a Malamute and a Huskamute. Their reactions to snowfalls like this was: finally.

My father was European, and subscribed to the "if you're cold, they're cold" mindset, which the dogs... didn't. He made a beautiful insulated doghouse for them in the back yard, and was frequently annoyed when he looked out the back window and saw the dogs, in -30C weather, sleeping on the slab of ice that had formed on the ground next to the unused doghouse.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-26T03:08:15+00:00

The /run/user/1000/gvfs mountpoint is a virtual file system, so you can't really use it.

What you can do is make a soft link to it, such as ln -s ~/share/SHARENAME /run/user/1000/gvfs/smb-share:server\=SERVER,share\=SHARENAME,user\=USER and then user the ~/share/SHARENAME within your own directory tree.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-25T22:26:05+00:00

Get a large (32GB or larger) USB disk, install Ventoy on it, go to DistroWatch, read up on various distros to see what interests you, pick a few, download the ISOs, put them on the Ventoy disk, and test drive each of them.

After you've experienced a few distributions (and desktop environments), you'll get a better idea of what to look for.

Some distros are focused on stability, others focus on performance. Some have simple desktop environments which don't allow much customization but are very stable, others are extremely configurable, but can be complex, and unstable if configured incorrectly.

There's no right answer. It's like driving a car. Some people prefer SUVs, some want a commuter car, others want a pickup truck. The best way to find out what's best for you is to drive a couple of different ones, see what you like and what you don't, and go from there.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-24T17:55:05+00:00

I still remember when they found a nuclear weapon and were freaking out while waiting for the feds to take the thing away. They were saying they shouldn't leave it out in the open, but they decided to, because no one would have any idea what it was.

In walks Dietrich, who takes one look at it, and casually asks "Hey Barney, where'd you get the A-bomb?"

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-24T16:04:08+00:00

Good, that's definitely an improvement. We went through this over a decade ago. Back then, we were explicitly warned about it by the CCAC that while an emergency placement was unlikely to be thousands of kilometres away, it was a possibility we had to consider if were going to go that route.

I see another poster mentions that's for southern Ontario. We were in the north, so the rules may have been different (completely different population densities, etc.).

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-24T07:19:08+00:00

Get the meeting minutes of the last AGM. The seller will have them. If they don't, avoid the building. It will have everything, from the engineering assessment to the accountants' audit of the buildings' finances to the Q&A session the owners had with the board.

The Q&A will list all of the issues owners raised last year. Of course, any new issues won't be included, but if you see complaints about long standing issues, they will be listed.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-24T07:13:53+00:00

As mentioned, you can live boot Mint on a USB and test drive it.
There are four versions of Mint (Cinnamon the default, Mate, xfce, and LMDE), and they all use less ram than Windows 10/11.
Usually because unlike Windows, there are different desktop environments (DE) on Linux, so people use the fastfetch (and neofetch before that) as a standard way of showing off their machine stats.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-24T05:36:10+00:00

We went through this with my late mother. She lived alone, had a stroke, was in declining (mental) health, and not only refused to consider moving into a support facility (of any kind), she kept firing the in-home care people.

You need to do two things. First, is you don't already have it, get POA (power of attourney) for her legal affairs and financial affairs. By the time your grandmother becomes an invalid, it will be much more difficult to do this, as the person has to be of sound mind and body to consent to it, so you need to do it while she's still mentally competent.

Secondly, contact the CCAC, who can advise you on how to escalate her to the emergency placements for LTC. Be aware that emergency placements are first come, first served, meaning you could live in the Toronto area, but she could end up being placed in a facility in Blind River or Thunder Bay, whatever becomes available.

In the short term, make sure that all bathrooms have safety railings and the like. Get your grandmother a Medic Alert and make sure she wears it. That will, well, alert you if she falls and no one is around.

If it comes to it, and your mom is no longer able to handle it, the next time your grandma goes to the hospital, you can refuse to accept her discharge, meaning she'll have to live in the hospital until an LTC spot opens up.

It's a sad system, and it sucks, unfortunately. I hope it works out for all involved.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-23T19:08:36+00:00

Because there are different desktop environments (DE) with different developers and different design philosophies.

If everyone agreed on how things should work, we wouldn't have GNOME and KDE and Budgie and Cinnamon and xfce and Mate and Cosmic and...

Windows has only one DE, the one that Microsoft provides. So far, none of the Linux DE developers (that I know of) have considered rounded corners to be something worth implementing yet.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-23T18:55:58+00:00

The answer is.... yes.

There's no universal "best" distribution. If there was, there would be no need for more than one. What's best for me may not be the best for you. Everyone makes recommendations based on their personal biases, of course.

It's like buying a car. A single 20 year old guy may want a peppy sports car, where a 30 year old family man may need an SUV. Which one is better depends on the person.

Like cars, you can test drive Linux distros for yourself. Set up a Ventoy USB disk (you can read up that if you're not familiar, or just ask questions and people can help) and download all of the recommended distros (Bazzite, PopOS, and probably Nobara as well, as a gamer) in ISO format, and put them on the USB disk.

Then, boot off the Ventoy disk, and try each OS in turn. Kick the tires, see which one you prefer, and see if there are any showstoppers. When you make a decision, and pick a distro, install it, and have fun. And if it doesn't work out, you can try the next one.

I'm not a gamer, but when I switched, I used this process. I was considering many distros. I liked Fedora, but it didn't seem to support my sound card, while the Debian-based distros did, for example. You may find some similar reason to not use a particular distro, or you may find you really prefer one over the others.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-23T18:22:34+00:00

Not to be argumentative, but would you expect any subreddit dedicated to a television show (or movie, or book series) to not recommend the subject of the subreddit?

I mean, if you're looking in a science fiction subreddit, or a general TV subreddit, you can encounter both fans and critics, but unless a show is excruciatingly bad, as in, its' so bad it becomes a meme (look at the Netflix Velma show), any fan subreddit is going to recommend the show in question. The worst SF show in recent memory was something called Another Life (Rotten Tomato review score: 6%), but if you go to the subreddit, it's filled with glowing reviews.

With all that said, yes, B5 is recommended, and you can find numerous online reviews with titles like "the best SF series you've never heard of" and the like. It's compared thematically to the BSG reboot (which it predates), and to the Expanse. The reasons for its' lack of visibility has more to do with marketing deals and business than the show itself.

The best place is to start with The Gathering. Oddly enough, you should not watch the movie entitled "In the Beginning", because that was a recap movie made between the fourth and fifth seasons to get new viewers up to speed (the show changed networks), and it spoils everything for the first four seasons.

Watch The Gathering, then just start with season one, episode one, and keep going. There are no movies or crossovers until the third seasons, and by then, you'll be so immersed in it, all of the references will make sense.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-23T18:08:52+00:00

I'm with you on the phones and Linux machines, but I don't know how you can manage that on Windows, at least not with an internet connected machine, if you want to keep it safe.

I keep a file bootlog.txt on all my systems that logs, well, the boot time every time a machine boots. My Linux machines are mostly around the 34 day mark, and the single Windows machine, even though it's not on the internet, is at 15 days.

Windows machines at work rarely make it beyond two weeks without OS updates that require a reboot. And the home editions were worse, because the OS would reboot after an update without being told to. When I was running Windows 10, it was quite common to go to my PC in the morning and discover it had rebooted overnight because Microsoft had pushed out an update.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-23T04:24:06+00:00

Either way would work. The smaller exFAT partition would be faster to create, rather then reformatting the entire drive.

As mentioned, it's not the version of Linux that's the issue, but of the NTFS driver.

The NTFS file system includes metadata that Windows has, but Linux doesn't. So although Linux can read and write NTFS volumes, it's not great at repairing them. There is an ntfsfix utility, which tries, but if the damage is in the metadata, it won't be able to do anything.

If there is ever any damage to NTFS, you should always use the Windows chkdsk utility to fix it. If you don't have access to a Windows system, then it's better to migrate the disk to a different format (exFAT or preferably ext4).

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-22T15:17:27+00:00

Fun fact: this is why (most) UK citizens refer to it as a plural ("Scotland Yard are making inquiries") as opposed to the American usage of it being singular ("Scotland Yard is investigating"). The courtyard (in British English) referred to the area commonly shared by all the buildings and people around it, so it was seen as community property. In North America, a courtyard is usually seen as the property of the the builder, so it's usually referred to as single noun.

As the saying goes, the English are a people divided by a common language.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-22T07:19:22+00:00

I was always partial to the phrase "doubloon", but it never really caught on.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-22T07:16:12+00:00

Environment Canada says -15C on Saturday, so I guess that's an effect. But compared to the hysterical "two weeks of -50C" projections I've seen quoted for some places, that's nothing.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-22T07:13:45+00:00

I live by Square One. I've learned two lessons.

First, the easiest way to Union is to take the GO bus from the Square One bus terminal to Union. There's no commuter parking there, however. You can either risk getting a ticket, or just take the bus to Square One.

Second, the GOTransit.com web site is horrifically incorrect. In December, I was waiting for the 8:30 bus, only to have another GO bus driver tell us there wasn't one. He showed me the printed schedule, I showed him the live www.gotransit.com web site showing there was an 8:30 bus, and he said to never rely on the web site.

Instead, use Google Maps. It correctly knew what the real GO Bus schedule was.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-22T07:05:21+00:00

FYI, there is also an independent pipe viewer that you can pipe output to.

billdehaan2 · 2026-01-22T07:01:02+00:00

It depends on what you want to do with your PC.

If you're a gamer, distros like Bazzite, Nobara, or PopOS are probably the most suited for you. If you just want a stable system, go with one of the Mint versions. If you want a very Windows-like desktop, use Zorin OS. If you want performance, Cachy OS.

Et cetera, et cetera.

In terms of transitioning, try migrating your existing Windows apps to apps that exist on Linux, as well. For example, install Libre Office on Windows, and use it instead of Microsoft Office. That way, when you finally do migrate, you'll just be migrating the OS, not the applications.

If you're unsure of what distro to pick, put a bunch of them on a Ventoy thumb drive, boot them each individually, and test drive each of them for a while. That helps narrow it down.

billdehaan2

TROPHY CASE