I don't like that the very first thing you see when you click on download is "purchase for $40" and then they list the benefits of doing so, which basically boil down to:

1- custom gnome themes 2- Professional-grade creative suite of apps 3- Advanced productivity software

Number 1 is a joke. Number 2 & 3 I think are basically scams. What apps? They don't list them at all. If they are proprietary then how can you support these apps with this pricing model, if they are not, then are they just downloadable by anyone on almost any distro for free?

The entire thing smells bad. I vote to stay far away.

I wouldn't recommend zorin, I had lot's of issues with it. Linux Mint is way more begginer friendly

That was my "entrypoint" distro to start fiddling with Linux. So I'd say, go for it until you are feeling confident enough to take the next step -- Linux Mint.

I've used Zorin Core 16 quite a bit before and it's a really good OS. It does a lot right that other distros can learn from. There's a lot of great UX stuff like automatically explaining what Wine is when you open an exe file, and in some cases recommending alternatives to Windows apps. Pretty much all the defaults are sane and I never really had to change much about the system after installation.

By far the most user friendly Linux distro out there imo. Would recommend for Linux beginners.

Zorin is the best distro to learn linux when coming from Windows. I have used Zorin 15.3 and Zorin 16.

The UI is nice, simple and reminds a lot of Windows. It is easy to understand (easier than Ubuntu, Debian, Pop!_OS and Linux Mint).

It has wine preinstalled and runs smoothly.

I like it, it's an Ubuntu lts with a nice theme (I wish it had grey instead of just black and white though), wine integration to run compatible windows software and it's always just worked for me.

I don't like the fact that some things are locked out unless you pay for the pro version but I think that's just layouts and stuff.

I'd say it's good but like all of these Ubuntu derivatives you're almost always better off just using Ubuntu. Even people changing from windows to Linux, I'd still just tell them to use Ubuntu.

It's a very clean and simple to use out of the box experience but beyond that it has no real use, it's a good choice to give your mom or for refurbishin laptops but for personal use it has little to no point

What does it do differently to any other “easy” distro?

This was my first distro! It's very beginner friendly and customization was very easier without requiring knowledge of GNOME extensions (which aren't hard to set up once you know they exist). The Wine integration is nothing short of fantastic making it very easy to install Windows apps and it even recommends some native Linux equivalents (Heroic Games launcher if you try to install Epic Games). I have since switched to Fedora Workstation Edition, but Zorin is a good way to dip your toe in the Linux pool while you learn more about it

I had issues when I tried Zorin. I still think Mint is probably the best for a new user.

I tried it, looking for something for my wife's 12 yearold laptop, and really liked how clean it looks and that you have 4 easy click ways to alter the desktop workflow. They are also working on Grid? as a deploy and update system for businesses wanting to manage multiple machines centrally. The only reason I didn't keep it was the machine it was intended for will not boot a deb based OS. It throws a hardware bug that deb based distros don't work around during install or reboot. So ended up with NixOS on that machine. Which has been awesome too.