I mean, you literally described 99,999% of distros tbf.

I use it. It's great. I've tried Linux many times over the past decade but it never stuck until Zorin. If you're coming from Windows it's a very friendly (and polished) way of being welcomed to Linux while also showing off Linux's strengths, things that are often hidden to the user unless they want to explore the terminal.

For Mac users who are Linux-curious I would recommend Ubuntu because it's much similar, whereas Zorin seems clearly designed with people who liked Windows 10 but not Windows 11.

Zorin was, at least a few years ago, tailored to be easy to adapt to for people switching from Windows. This new version looks beautiful, I'm going to take it for a spin!

Tbh I see it as "prettier linux mint". Good distro for beginners but nothing more

oh yeah. its an out of the box for folks (like myself) who like that. Lots of apps preinstalled including play on linux. So I can install and start using without adding any additional software. Its not the only oob distro but combining that with the look feel emulation is great and I have never seen an oob that sets up wine so well to use immediately. So its a bit like a combo of a gaming distro with oob and then the lookNfeel thing.

No, but I used this back when I was a little penguin and I had to "see" something working on Linux.

whats bad with gnome

It is Gnome.

you are free to not make distros

You're right. I will start a new distro that focuses on the the things that matter.

Damn, those silly volunteers are doing the wrong things in their free time!

I think a unified package manager/app store model that is vetted by all contributing distros would go a long way. SteamOS/Steam deck is bringing gamers to linux and that's great. But it would be easier to bring on a lot more desktop users if there was an app store that every distro could visit. Flatpak is close, snaps however I think are too polarizing.

I disagree. Each distro is a user of a thousand different open source systems. When a distro developer integrates gnome, systemd, bluez, or whatever other system they're finding, reporting, and possibly fixing bugs that end users might miss. Other than arch users, who else is compiling these things from scratch and really digging into the documentation?

such as?

I mean you still can