Published Apr 15, 2026, 12:01 PM EDT
Rob LeFebvre is an editor and writer focusing on consumer and enterprise technologies for a broad range of outlets. He’s been writing online for more than 15 years; before that he was a special educator for kids with severe disabilities.
Rob has been an Editorial Director at Lifewire, a news writer at Engadget, and a senior contributor at Cult of Mac. He's written about PCs, Macs, mobile phones, and games, created newsrooms from the ground up, and has extensive experience reviewing hardware, software, and games across his career.
After installing Asahi Linux on an Apple MacBook Air M1, I got a lot of comments about how user-friendly Zorin OS is. As I had a friend's old HP Pavilion m6 laptop sitting around, I figured, why not give it a try.
After a quick boot drive created on a flash drive I also had in my tech box (you know the one), I installed Zorin on this older machine and gave it a test. To be honest, I found Zorin to be fairly user-friendly, and one I might recommend to my less tech-savvy friends and relatives if they were looking for a way to make their older PCs useful again.
WIth Windows 10's end of life process driving millions of downloads of Zorin OS, as well, I figured it would be a great time to test it out myself.
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It's visually similar to Windows
And macOS, if you like
One of the selling points of Zorin OS is the easy appearance manager. This is an app right at the top level of the Zorin "Start" menu, and it makes short work of changing your workspace. The basic OS, which I tested out, has four different layouts that manage where the taskbar/dock is, whether there's a Start menu-like experience, and how open apps appear at the bottom of the screen. I chose the most Windows-like look and feel, and it just required a click in the app; no restart required. It's not just a theme, either, as it lets users used to the major OS workflows to ease into a new way of doing things. Reducing this sort of friction is one reason I'd recommend newbies try Zorin out.
In my personal use, It felt like a Windows machine. I could right-click and control-V to my heart's content and I didn't have to learn new muscle memory or search for solutions or config files, a problem I've had in the past when jumping into less comfortable distributions. Dragging a window to the top of the screen showed a familiar tiling solution, the minimize and close window symbols are the same as on my PC, and it all felt comfortable and easy to use. Opening several apps, I found their logos down in the system tray where I expected them, and the Start menu to the far bottom left corner got me to the apps and Settings without a single guess.
If you want more workflow layouts, you'll want to spring for Zorin OS Pro for $48, which gets you more than the standard (Windows-like, Touch, Windows List-like, GNOME Shell-like) desktop layouts. If you go Pro, you can also make your laptop look like macOS, Windows Classic, ChromeOS, Compact, Ubunto, elementary OS, and Cinnamon.
The Pro version also gets you some great creative apps, the ability to use keyboards and mice across desktops, and a screencasting feature. Plus, you get to support development of this distribution, which makes it a no-brainer to upgrade.
Installing apps doesn't require a terminal
The store works real well, too
One fact of Linux use that might stop beginners is the need to use Terminal to install apps. Zorin has a great app store right up front, though, which will make any newbie more comfortable from the start. Yes, it's Linux, so all you power-users can use apt-get and other package systems to get your specialized apps. Zorin, however, lets you search for apps in a store interface, which has big colorful icons and the like to make it feel easy and approachable. I downloaded VLC, Krita, Steam, and Joplin to the HP running Zorin with no problem. You can even choose different ways to get the app: Flatpack, Snap, or repository builds are there (if available on a per-app basis) for more advanced users, as well. When I went for Krita at first, I chose the non-Flatpack version and got some wonky icons. I went back to Flatpack and just let Zorin OS pick for me from then on.
Is it easier than the Mac App Store or Microsoft Store on Windows? Not necessarily, but that isn't the point. The whole idea here is that Zorin OS provides an easy-to-understand way to find and install software without getting bogged down in Linux choices and repositories. That goes a long way to make folks new to Linux less anxious.
Running Windows apps
Genuinely useful, but there are limits
One of the selling points of Zorin OS is that it comes ready to detect and run .exe and .msi files, and will either run them in Wine or suggest a Linux alternative. That's exactly what I ran into when I tried to download and install the Windows version of Notpad++. When I double-clicked the .exe file, Zorin OS asked if I wanted to instead get the Linux alternative, Notepad Next, which can be installed from the Software app. The easy next step would have been to hit Return and do just that. Instead, I clicked on the Install Windows App Support (I guess the basic installation of Zorin OS doesn't come with it by default) and went to Software to download the Wine and Bottles app called Windows App Support.
The installation never took, though, so I'm unsure if this is a solid reason to use Zorin OS. I got stuck in an Uninstallation loop in the Software app, and repeated canceling and re-installing the app never got to a place where I could actually install Notepad++. I totally used Notepad Next after that.
Wine compatibility can be inconsistent and some complex modern apps that rely on Windows DLLs can often fail or need extra configuration.
Performance on old hardware
An honest verdict
The 12-year-old HP Pavilion m6 I installed Zorin on goes for between $33 and $50 on eBay. It's not a scorcher, by any means, but with Zorin OS on it, it felt actually usable. Apps launched in an appreciable amount of time, windows opened and resized cleanly, and I was able to connect mice, keyboards, and monitors (with the right adapter) to the thing without any real issue.
The developers promise support for machines up to 15 years old, and there's even a Zorin OS Lite that can run on lower-spec hardware. It's a pretty flexible OS, to be honest.
I had up to five apps running at once, and I didn't really notice a slowdown, other than the speed of working on such an old machine. I definitely plan on putting Zorin OS on more capable hardware in the future to use it more regularly. Now if only they'd make it work on Apple Silicon.
The distribution to beat
I'm now a Zorin OS fan. Added to all the capable software and easy to understand computing metaphors, Zorin, like many Linux distributions, ships with no telemetry, no forced cloud account sign-ups, and no mandatory Microsoft logins. It ships with privacy-focused Brave browser, which further announces the OS's approach to privacy.
Using Zorin on an older machine was a delight, and certainly fits the bill as a beginner-focused distribution. It has a fantastic presentation, making Linux feel like a consumer product more than a technical mishmash. Installing this on an old HP made me a believer, for sure.
HP Pavillion m6
This 12-year-old laptop still has legs, especially when you install an OS like Zorin, which caters to older hardware. It's got a 15-inch screen, an HDMI port, Bluetooth, and an Intel Core i5. You can't go wrong at this price, either.