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

Did you even read the whole comment?

just stick with the free version and find free viable alternatives. Libreoffice, kdenlive, etc.

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

I respected their time and was simply making a suggestion because zorin seems scummy locking default features behind a paywall.

Most distros come with a built in software downloader. If you consider it “work” to type kdenlive and click download ive got nothing else to say to you.

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

I used the plasma-meta package and to be sure I just now used arch-chroot on a flashdrive and removed plasma entirely. Cleared pacman with -Scc and then reinstalled plasma-meta and all its dependencies.

Also breeze-gtk and oxygen-gtk were the only themes in the long list of dependencies. Maybe they removed them to shorten install times and shrink the size of the DE install?

Youre comment is greatly appreciated. it also gave me an idea. Im next going to install downgrade and check if the dependencies change to add more themes in a previous version.

I could also be crazy and manually installed a bunch of themes one night. but i barely put any work into the look and feel of the DE so im almost 99% sure this is not the case

Update this did not work downgrading breaks dependencies and will not let me since force was depreciated…

After some tests with many different keyboards from f-droid, not a single one of the roughly 12 I tested were able to send capital letters. My workaround would be use a keyboard that allows for custom keys and add shift or a capslock input to the keyboard.

I tried “unexpected keyboard” which had the option to do this but i cannot for the life of me figgure out how to actually press capslock when its added to the keyboard its set to the letter A but its not useable through normal means i must have to hold it or something and i cannot figgure it out.

My other solution is to buy one of these

Its a dinky wireless keyboard with a left click on the top left making it holdable like a game controller and all mouse inputs are useable with only thumbs. Its great for using a keyboard from a bed or couch.

Best of luck

I use fossify, im going to test this on my device later after work and see if i can reproduce any issues you are experiencing. Any specifics would help. (just want to see if the problem is limited to you)

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.