Want a pretty OS? Look no further. Zorin comes as close as any operating system to rivalling Windows 11’s featherweight fluid design. We’re testing the free Zorin OS Core, but there are alternatives for older computers (Zorin OS Lite) and professional users (Zorin OS Pro).

Lite switches the highly customized Gnome 43 desktop environment for Xfce, while Pro, which costs £39 exc VAT, bundles installation support and additional software for image editing, 3D graphics, video editing, note taking and more. Pro can be installed on multiple computers with a single license, unless you’re a business or education user, in which case you’ll need a license for each machine.

Whichever version you choose, Zorin is based on Ubuntu, with the latest build running on the 6.2 kernel. Support runs until at least April 2027.

Linux Mint is often touted as the best Linux for Windows switchers, and certainly it takes very little time to become comfortable with its Cinnamon desktop. However, for our money, Zorin is better yet. The default UI has the taskbar and Start-style menu of both Windows and Mint, and the color scheme is immediately familiar. It’s supplemented by three other themes, with one adopting the traditional Gnome shell and another optimized for touch – and, if you upgrade to Zorin Pro, you get additional desktop styles, including more explicit Windows 11, macOS, Chromebook and Gnome 2 options.

You may be able to bring some of your Windows apps with you, with optional Windows App Support, which uses Wine and its graphical front end, PlayOnLinux. However, you can install these yourself on other distros (and Nitrix has it built in, in the form of Bottles), so they’re not a reason to choose Zorin in their own right – and Windows application support isn’t 100%, so don’t expect to be able to run everything you rely on today. That said, the one-click setup may well make this implementation a tempting one for less confident switchers.

Zorin introduced an upgrader with version 16.3, which was simultaneously rolled out to existing version 15 installations. This preserves your files, apps and settings when you make a full-point upgrade. Previously, such upgrades required a clean start and manual migration. It sits alongside a carefully curated selection of default software. LibreOffice 7.6.3 is preinstalled, but GIMP isn’t. The default browser is Firefox, and for email it’s Evolution. This is a good-looking alternative to Thunderbird, but with the latter receiving a significant brush-up in its 115 release, we’re inclined to switch, simply so we can run the same client on both Linux and Windows.

Both the Core and Pro builds include Zorin Connect, which maintains an encrypted local-network connection between your computer and an Android phone. You can sync notifications, share files, and control music and video playback across devices. You can also use it to turn your phone into a remote keyboard and mouse, or a controller for PC-based presentations. If you want the same features in an alternative distribution, check out KDE Connect (kdeconnect.kde.org).

You can download anything that’s not preinstalled from the integrated app store, which is set up to use Zorin and Ubuntu repositories, Flathub and Snap Store. This all makes for a friction-free environment for Linux newbies, and we were pleased to see that both printers on our network were recognized on first boot.

If you’re new to Linux and nervous about switching, then, Zorin could be just the distribution you’ve been searching for. It looks great, feels immediately familiar (even if you don’t pay for the Windows 11-style UI of Zorin Pro) and goes to significant lengths to simplify working with your mobile – so long as it’s running Android – and integrating (some) Windows applications. It feels like the best Linux distro for Windows switchers who want to quickly feel at home.

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WatchGuard’s family of Firebox security appliances offers an unbeatable range of desktop solutions, and the T45-CW brings 5G failover to the table. Ideal for businesses that need always-on internet access for remote sites, its multi-WAN features combine wired and 5G mobile connections in a single policy so if one goes down, the other seamlessly steps in and takes over.

The T45-CW’s quad-core 1.6GHz NXP CPU claims a high raw firewall throughput of 3.94Gbits/sec and 557Mbits/sec with all UTM services enabled. It has five gigabit ports for WAN, LAN plus DMZ duties and, unlike many table-top security appliances, it offers secure Wi-Fi 6 services.

The appliance delivers a wealth of security features, and it’s easy to choose the right subscription as WatchGuard offers two options. A Basic Security Suite subscription enables gateway antivirus, anti-spam, web filtering, HTTPS inspection, IPS, application controls, WatchGuard’s RED (reputation enabled defense) cloud-based URL filtering and network discovery.

We’ve shown the price for a three-year Total Security Suite subscription, which adds WatchGuard’s advanced persistent threat (APT) blocker with cloud sandboxing, DNSWatch for monitoring client DNS requests and blocking access to known malicious domains, IntelligentAV anti-malware services and ThreatSync XDR, which provides policy-based collection, correlation and automated responses for Firebox threat events.

Local management is simple. The web console runs a wizard to enable wired internet access, activate a basic security policy and create a wireless SSID. Our unit came with a Vodafone 5G SIM and, after enabling the internal modem, the SIM came online.

WatchGuard includes four SMA external aerials; LEDs on the front panel show the cellular signal strength, failover status and whether you have a 4G LTE or 5G connection. Configuring failover is a cinch: you use the multi-WAN feature to define primary and backup connections and decide how failback is handled.

In practice, it works perfectly. We set up a continuous ping to an external website and then pulled the wired internet cable. We saw a single ping timeout, after which it continued unabated, and when we plugged the WAN cable in again, the appliance swapped back to it without any ping timeouts being recorded.

Naturally, you can use 5G as your primary connection, and defining the modem as an external interface means all your security policies will be automatically applied to it. In fact, you can have both wired and 5G internet connections active and use multi-WAN round-robin weightings to determine how connections are distributed across them.

For cloud management, we registered the appliance with our support account, allocated it to our site and chose the management and monitoring option. After reconfiguration, the T45-CW disables its local web interface, takes further settings from the cloud and provisions full access for remote configuration.

All security functions are easily accessible. From the portal’s content scanning page, you use a simple slider bar to enable the gateway AV, IntelligentAV, APT blocker and spamBlocker services. Anti-spam policies are available for SMTP, IMAP or POP3 traffic, where you allow, deny or tag spam messages in their subject line for ongoing local rule processing.

From the network blocking section, you can control botnet detection, IPS, custom blocked URLs and ports plus detection of Tor (The onion router) exit points. Web content filtering offers 130 URL categories for blocking or allowing, while WatchGuard’s application control service presents over 1,250 predefined app signatures.

The multi-WAN function is found in the device’s networks page where you select the Global WAN option, choose failover or round-robin operations and set the failback mode. Move to the portal’s monitoring page and you can see the status and strength of the 5G connection and view RSRP and RSRQ graphs.

Businesses that hate internet downtime will love WatchGuard’s Firebox T45-CW. It provides a wealth of top-class security services, can be easily cloud managed and delivers seamless 5G WAN failover.

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Debian-based Ubuntu is the jumping-off point for many other distributions, including Linux Mint and Zorin OS. The Desktop edition is available in at least two builds: the so-called LTS (Long Term Support) build, which receives support for a minimum of five years from release, and the bleeding-edge release, which comes with nine months of security and maintenance updates. In each case, the build number – 23.10 in the case of this review – denotes the year and month of release, so 23.10 will enjoy support until July 2024, and 22.04 LTS until April 2027. New releases appear every six months for the cutting-edge build, and every other year for the LTS edition.

Both 23.10 and 22.04.3 LTS require 4GB of memory, 25GB of drive space and a 2GHz dual-core processor, despite running on different kernels (6.5 versus 5.17) and desktop environments (Gnome 45 versus Gnome 41/42). Build 23.10 is also running more up-to-date versions of its default applications, Firefox, LibreOffice and Thunderbird. Of these, perhaps the most significant is Thunderbird, which sits at 91 in the LTS release and at 115.2 in 23.10. Thunderbird 115 introduced significant interface improvements and, even if you install the LTS release, we’d recommend updating Thunderbird to at least 115 yourself.

As well as the desktop edition, there are builds for server and IoT platforms, with the latter including Raspberry Pi. The Pi edition is available directly through the Raspberry Pi Imager. There’s also an immutable build, in which the core system files are protected against tampering.

None of the installer’s questions is too taxing. You don’t need to know what kind of security your network uses, as you do for openSUSE, and we didn’t need to play around with the partitioning of our drive to complete the process successfully.

Once up and running, you’re presented with a largely vanilla workspace. Although Ubuntu has its own style, it remains fairly faithful to Gnome’s default look and feel, rather than making a significant departure as Zorin does (or as Nitrux does from KDE Plasma). If you don’t like Gnome, you’ll find alternative builds with a little searching. Kubuntu (kubuntu. org) switches it out for KDE, while Ubuntu Budgie (ubuntubudgie.org) and Ubuntu Cinnamon (ubuntucinnamon.org) naturally use Budgie and Cinnamon respectively. Lubuntu (lubuntu.me), using Qt, and Xubuntu (xubuntu.org), using Xfce, are both Ubuntu-recognized ports for lower powered computers.

Apps can be installed using the built-in App Center or via the Terminal using apt. The App Center, which gives access to both Debian and Snap packages, has been upgraded in 23.10, and certainly feels more engaging than the installer it replaced. There’s a handy “Jump start your desktop” at the top of the homepage that gives direct access to the most commonly installed apps, rather like the recommended software section in Raspberry Pi OS. Other named sections, including a Productivity section, make it easy to find essentials such as alternative browsers, Bitwarden and Slack. Neither Inkscape nor GIMP are preinstalled, but the versions available through App Center match the latest-edition version numbers available from their respective sites.

More good news? On first boot, both of the wireless printers on our network were successfully recognized and set up.

For many newcomers, Ubuntu may well be a byword for Linux, and it’s easy to see why. Installation is a breeze and, once complete, it just works. The new features in this latest release, including the updated App Center and Gnome 45, are subtle but welcome improvements over their predecessors, and the default interface is unflashy and provides few distractions.

Ubuntu was our Labs Winner last time around, and nothing changes here – so long as you’re happy running Gnome. If you aren’t, take a look at KDE-based openSUSE Tumbleweed or Cinnamon-based Linux Mint.

It’s not difficult to find an Ubuntu-based distribution running KDE, Budgie and several other desktop managers, although, as they’re not directly controlled by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu itself, it’s fairer to consider them different products.

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Rocky Linux is one of the youngest distributions around, first appearing in mid-2021. It’s based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so in some ways is a natural home for anyone previously running CentOS, a community-supported version of Red Hat terminated in December 2020.

Rocky’s first release was version 8.3, reflecting the fact that it was based on the same version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The version-8 line remains current, despite 8.9 appearing two days after 9.3, which itself is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3. That’s the version we’re testing here. Planned end of life for the Rocky 9 line is May 2032. For Rocky 8, it’s May 2029.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses Fedora source code in its development, so Fedora and Rocky naturally share several touch points. However, where Fedora 39 is built on the 6.6.3 kernel, Rocky Linux 9.3 is built on the same 5.14 Linux kernel as Red Hat 9.3. While this may look outdated, it shouldn’t be an issue, as Red Hat uses a system known as backporting to implement fixes and features within the existing kernel while maintaining compatibility with overlaying applications.

Installation is straightforward. There’s no media builder as there is for Fedora, so it’s a case of downloading the ISO and using balenaEtcher or similar to write it to a bootable thumb drive. The full DVD ISO is a hefty beast, tipping the scales at 9GB. However, there are lighter “boot” and “minimal” builds that can be used to enter rescue mode and install the OS from an alternative source, like an online repository. There are four processor builds, covering x86_64, ARM, PowerPC and IBM s390x servers (although only the first two of these are available for Rocky 8). Dig deeper and you’ll find a build specific to Raspberry Pi in the alternative images library.

Although Gnome is the default window manager, you can swap it out for KDE, Xfce, Mate or Cinnamon.

We opted for the DVD ISO and, once up and running, were dropped into Gnome 40.4, which feels dated if you’re accustomed to Gnome 45. Aside from the operating system, we didn’t have much to show for our 9GB download. Firefox was pre-installed, but there was no email client, office suite or image editor. These are all available through the Software app, and we were glad to see that the version of Thunderbird available through the repository was 115 (which benefits from a significant redesign). However, LibreOffice, had we chosen to install it through the default repository, would have been version 7.1 (the latest build is 7.6), GIMP was one point behind the latest build, and Inkscape was at 1.1.1, while its latest stable release is 1.3.2.

Further hurdles: the two printers on our network hadn’t been recognized upon first booting and updating the system, and we needed to enter their IP addresses in the printer setup dialog to add them to the OS.

Less rocky was this distribution’s turn of pace. Rocky Linux 9.3 returned a respectable 1,097 in the single-core Geekbench test and 3,112 in the multicore test. Despite the different kernels, this was broadly similar to the scores we saw when testing under Fedora, which turned in 1,105 and 3,053 respectively. In either case, we would be surprised if this made a noticeable difference in day-to-day use.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that our verdict is so similar to that for Fedora, which was our runner-up to Ubuntu. They are, after all, the bread in a Red Hat sandwich, sitting at either end of the development chain. If you don’t want to run a Debian-based OS, either would be an excellent choice, being well supported and closely aligned to one of the pre-eminent commercial Linux distributions.

Of the two, we would opt for Fedora. There are three reasons why. First, it got us up and running more quickly. Second, for bundling Gnome 45. And third, for including a wider range of pre-installed default applications, each running a recent build.

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