Zorin OS 18 Next Steps: Typora, The GIMP, Games, More ⭐

Zorin OS 18 continues to impress in that it makes Linux much more approachable and even Windows-like in many ways. But Linux still has rough edges that will trip up those making the transition, and overcoming the lack of familiarity will take time.

Mostly, this has been a positive experience, and I’m impressed by the polish I see here. But over the past ten days or more I have noted a few issues that aren’t ideal. There are small things, like the lack of a PIN or Windows Hello-type biometric sign-in, a minor daily convenience I do miss. And then perhaps more troubling issues tied to power management where I open up the laptop in the morning and it doesn’t power on because the battery completely drained overnight. It appears to be configured correctly, so it’s difficult to know where to turn.

But Zorin OS is slick. It’s clean and handsome looking in ways Windows 11 just isn’t, with a nice level of polish throughout. This is not the traditional vibe I get from Linux and while it’s not unique to this distribution, it’s nicely done. I find myself wanting to make this work, which I think is a good sign. Perhaps I need to try this on a different laptop as well, though most of the non-Arm PCs I have here are HPs and most are Intel-based.

Anyway, since the first write-up, I’ve taken a few additional steps configuring and using Zorin OS 18. So here are some of the more notable changes.

Quick Microsoft Office follow-up

I don’t really use Microsoft Office and I had some understanding that it wasn’t possible to install recent versions of the suite on Linux. But I gave it the oldvcollege try, so to speak, and can at least confirm that it doesn’t work. So those who do rely on Office will find Linux problematic unless they can use the web app versions or are comfortable switching to alternatives like LibreOffice, which comes bundled in Zorin OS and admittedly looks quite nice.

Typora and … GIMP?

What I do use, of course, is Markdown and usually with the Typora app which, as it turns out, is available for Linux. Installing it takes a bit of work, but configuring it was also more time consuming than usual because I have a very specific configuration that I store and copy over on new Windows installs and I had to do all that manually here, including installing a few fonts. But all’s well that ends well, as they say. And Ghostwriter, an alternative I installed previously, is pretty good too.

I used Typora to write this article in Zorin OS and then publish it to the Thurrott.com website, as I’ve done with a few articles now. There are no issues to speak of, though the image editing bit was interesting. Zorin OS comes with The GIMP, a free and open source Photoshop-like app, but it’s quite foreign to me and just figuring out some basic tasks (resizing, which it calls scale image) and exporting to JPEG were a bit trying on the first go-round.

There are plug-ins for The GIMP like this one that make it look and work more like Photoshop, including the keyboard shortcuts, which I would appreciate. I haven’t figured that out yet though.

Speaking of which.

Visual Studio Code and Git

Typora is job one for writing, for me, but Visual Studio Code and Git are both key to my daily workflow, too, as I use them both for the books. And so I went down a rabbit hole trying to make those work properly. The issue isn’t Visual Studio Code, as Linux installers are available right on the app’s website and even more easily from the Zorin OS Software app, its app store. No, the problem is Git.

On Windows, I install Git with the Windows Package Manager (winget) and then sign in from the command line, which pushes me to a web browser where I can use my Proton Pass-based passkey to authenticate and get to work. It’s quick and seamless, and I’ve gotten used to it.

In Linux, I started as I always do by trying to emulate my Windows-based routine. Linux has its own Terminal app and command line environment, of course, and you can use the APT (Advanced Packaging Tool) via the apt-get command line tool, which works similarly to winget. So I used the following to install Git:

sudo apt-get install git

That is straightforward enough, but my next step was to try and clone one of my book repositories to a local folder (Documents). And that did not go so well.

Normally, I do this with a command line like the following:

git clone [repository url] local-folder-name

But instead of pushing me to authenticate via a web browser, the Linux command line prompted me to enter my GitHub password. And that will never work because GitHub disabled password-based access for Git operations over 4 years ago. So I just get an error message, and it’s unclear how this is even possible in 2025.

Naturally, I Googled the issue. This told me I needed to create a Personal Access Token (PAT) which I could use in place of a password for git clone and similar operations. I created that using the instructions on GitHub Docs. I also installed gh (GitHub CLI) with apt-get after seeing various examples online using that instead of git. To use this, you have to authenticate against your Git account in the browser, which lets me use my passkey, and that works fine.

But then it just fails when I use what GitHub tells me is the correct command line.

There are other possibilities here, including some Visual Studio Code-based interfaces. And I will need to figure this one out, of course. But since this isn’t really a mainstream activity, I will move on for now.

Phone integration

Phone Link is inarguably one of Windows 11’s best features, and while its functionality varies a lot depending on which phone model you have, even the basics are nice to have. Zorin comes with a utility called Zorin Connect that I thought would be similar, and you set it up similarly in that you have to install an app on your phone and then link the two devices. This was simple enough, but it doesn’t appear to do much beyond displaying Android-based notifications in the top center of the (Zorin OS) display, as with native notifications, at first glance. There are several technical functions you can trigger from the mobile app.

It’s not all that obvious, but you can access your phone’s text messaging functionality from a menu that appears when you click the Zorin Connect icon in Quick Settings. This is useful but I feel like phone calls and photos have to happen as well.

Gaming first steps

I knew going into this that Valve has made big strides getting games working on Linux thanks in large part to Steam OS, SteamDeck, and the ever-improving Proton emulator. And that this will involve some games working natively and some being Windows games using emulation. So the clearest path forward was to simply install Steam and see whether there were ways to filter the library view to those games that will work well, or work at all, in Linux.

This worked OK until it didn’t. I got Steam installed easily enough and then I used that to install a few games from my collection, including Black Mesa (the Half-Life 2 remake) and Doom Eternal, which ran, eventually, though they each took their sweet time in doing so. And the frame rates aren’t great in either.

It’s possible, likely really, that this is partially the PC’s fault. The laptop I chose does have a low-end GPU but it’s not for gaming, and it’s not all that great for Windows-based gaming either. But I don’t have a way to do a side-by-side comparison, and I feel like a different laptop might work out better.

I’m also getting full-on system freezes when I try to run Steam sometimes, and I have to literally hold down the power button on the PC until it turns off and then restart it. So this one is a bit fragile. I will work on this one way or the other, but at this point that may be a better experience on a beefier PC.

So much to do

There’s a lot more to do here, actually. Most obviously, I’d like to figure out a cloud storage sync solution that goes beyond the basic account integration in Zorin OS (and the SMB-based network access to my NAS). But I will keep using Zorin OS one way or the other and see if I can’t smooth out the rough edges. It feels worth it.