I also use ddg but im pretty sure they sell your data to microsoft. Also firefox has been under fire for privacy complaints and censorship. If privacy is a concern you might aswell find another solution.

If you just want it to work Id try waterfox (what i use), or some other fork of firefox that focuses on privacy, ive also heard good things about ungoogled chromium.

Hope that helps

Yeah fully agree, i just wasnt willing to outright call them scummy. If anything the 50$ price tag should drop to ~20$ since the software they are packaging is not even their own work.

Zorin itself is foss but paying for features like themeing and software Is imo against the spirit of linux, they should, (again imo) release zorin pro as the default and simply accept donations. Like most distro maintainers. Even more frustrating, is the advertised features are just normal features and software readily available for free on other distros being paywalled. Its very likely that a user could get all of the listed features on the free version without paying. I also misread the website, ms office and adobe premier are not even what is included. In fact they do not list the specific names of the alternatives that they use in the pro version. I would bet that the pro version Has all foss software that is being hidden behind the price tag. I will do more quick research and edit this comment if that is the case.

Edit: Yeah i nailed it, its all foss software available through most package managers or flatpak heres a list.

Additional Software Included in Zorin Pro: Office & Productivity:

LibreOffice: A comprehensive office suite compatible with Microsoft Office/365 documents: https://www.libreoffic…​

Scribus: A desktop publishing application: https://sourceforge.ne…​

Graphics & Multimedia: Krita: A powerful, open-source image editing and painting software: https://krita.org/

Inkscape: A vector graphics editor: https://inkscape.en.so…​

Blender: A free and open-source 3D creation suite: https://www.blender.org/​

GIMP: A free and open-source image manipulation program: https://www.gimp.org/d...​

Evince: A Gnome document viewer: https://apps.gnome.org…​

Foliate: A simple and lightweight e-book reader: https://flathub.org/ap...​

Kdenlive: A non-linear video editor: https://kdenlive.org/e...​

FreeCAD: A free and open-source 3D design application: https://www.freecad.or…​

LibreCAD: A free and open-source 2D CAD software: https://wiki.librecad…​

Darktable: An open-source digital photo management and editing tool: https://www.darktable…​

ALL of the listed features from zorin pro have free alternatives, unless you really want microsoft office, screen sharing, adobe premier, etc… just stick with the free version and find free viable alternatives. Libreoffice, kdenlive, etc. How did you land on zorin to begin with? Most new users are recommended to use fedora, ubuntu-gnome, and linux mint. To me, just looking at zorins website they do not share the most basic principles of the linux space (being free and open source). I highly recomend switching, if you could run

echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP

This will output the name of your display manager like gnome, kde, etc. The version of zorin you are running is more than certainly using a popular one. Just find a distro that uses the same one. And your user experience will be almost exactly the same. Zorin might have some QOL features but definitely not anything you couldnt implement yourself.

Feel free to reach out here for more help if you run into any brick walls. You already dual booted your pc so i have faith that you have a pretty good grasp on what you are doing. If time is a factor and you just need a distro that “works” stick with what you have, and find FOSS alternatives for zorin. Best of luck

Personally, I configure my entire os before signing in to websites or any software (or putting any privacy critical info on my system) then I backup my os to my NAS using rescuezilla, using linux its usually max 30Gb. I also have a private github repo that i backup my dotfiles to just in case my NAS kicks the bucket. Going back to a “clean” install after doing something stupid kinda sucks but at least all your hard work making it look and feel the way you want will persist. I also highly reccomend doing some sort of offline & off network backup for privacy sensative information. Best of luck, I feel your pain I nuked my system once after days of work and i said, never again.

Using a pan and a propane grill are vastly different imo. I dont dislike charcoal or wood. I think each has thier own place depending on the meal you are preparing. For example I like to make steak and chicken kabobs on a propane grill and burgers and hotdogs on a charcoal.

At the end of the day though seasoning and meat quality take center stage. So its all about what you have access to and can afford.

Taste the meat not the heat.

All things considered I think they did a pretty good job. He reminded me alot of someone I went to elementary with. They were insanely smart, for example he could recite the entire periodic table at 10 years old from memory, Atomic mass and everything. They were bullied relentlessly by everyone. I havent seen them in years but i could totally imagine he grew up to be similar to Jack.

Do you get to the cloud district very often? Oh, what am I saying? Of course you don’t.

Quickly googled it and fennec is no longer maintained by mozilla, the new fork is called fennec f-droid which is what most users are using now so you were technically correct (the best kind of correct)

fennec fdroid is android firefox stripped of proprietary and data collection and i had not heard of it prior to being on f-droid so i was unaware that I even had to specify between the two versions i assumed mozilla had nothing to do with it

Waterfox is a solid alternative, fennec for android.