First Steps: Zorin OS 18 ⭐

It’s been too long since I spent a meaningful amount of time using Linux, but the recent release of Zorin OS 18 inspired me to do so this week. So far, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive, with Zorin OS correctly identifying and supporting the full range of hardware features in an HP EliteBook, including its discrete and integrated GPUs.

I had wanted to have this write-up ready for the Zorin OS 18 launch last week, as I had access to a near-final beta version of the system ahead of time. But a series of issues, including a problem with the laptop that I initially chose for this test (not Zorin’s fault), pushed it back a bit. And I still have much to do, most notably in trying to figure out how this laptop might be used for gaming. But in the meantime, here’s what I have done so far.
Installation
Zorin OS Core is free and the ISO (x64 only) is a 3.5 GB download. So I started with that. I usually use Rufus to create USB-based installation media, but I couldn't get that first laptop noted above to boot with that (or any other USB disk, I later discovered). And so I tried again on the EliteBook I’m now using and that didn’t work either. So I switched to balenaEtcher, which, granted, Zorin recommends, and the installation media I created with that app worked fine.

If you’re familiar with Linux, you know that most Linux distribution installation media boots into a live environment so you can test the system before committing to installing it. So that’s what I did with Zorin OS 18 at first, with an eye on examining some of its new features (see below) and whether it would correctly identify and work with the hardware components in the PC.

Hardware support, at least for this 2- or 3-year-old Intel-based laptop, is perfect, from what I can tell. The system came up in the native 2880 x 1800 resolution of the display panel on the first go and everything seemed to work properly from display dimming and USB ports to sleep and instant-on. I later confirmed with an app called Hardware Probe that most of the hardware components are indeed working fine, the one exception being the fingerprint reader.

With that success, I decided to simply install Zorin OS on the laptop. It gave me the option to dual-boot with Windows, but I wiped out the existing installation and installed Zorin OS 18 as the only OS. Once that was done, I started configuring the system and then decided to upgrade from Zorin OS 18 Core to Zorin OS 18 Pro. This costs about $35 and adds 8 more desktop layouts, more apps (mostly creative and productivity focused), and more. But it was mostly about the desktop layouts. That upgrade, oddly, took longer than expected, maybe 30 to 40 minutes.

Initial configuration
I went through a series of initial configuration tasks that I didn’t fully document for myself, but this included at least the following:

Display Settings. I changed the scale level from 100 percent to 200 percent and configured Night Light...