Zorin has a commercial license for additional GUI front ends, installation support, and a bunch of "professional" apps. It's not clear if they've done something to make adobe/Autodesk/pro audio stuff work on Linux, pre-bundled their FOSS alternatives, or have made software themselves.

Personally, if I was looking for something "professional", I'd go PopOS!. But if I were a small or mid-sized business I'd consider Zorin Pro if I could get license to include additional support outside the installer... Or just buy System76 computers with PopOS! pre-installed and support built-in to their sales pipeline already.

That said, Mint is also very Windows (classic)-like in their GUI experince (intentionally). It also has one of the largest Linux communities focusing on GUI usability.

Depends on your use case on which flavor you should go. But for $50, I'm curious what Zorin's software suite is and might dive in.

I'd advise using Mint in place of Ubuntu as your training wheels/potential daily driver, since Ubuntu's developers (Cannonical) have the habit of making features and restrictions absent in the rest of the ecosystem (Snap comes to mind).

Mint has a much larger and more dedicated userbase, so you probably will have an easier time finding answers to questions (Mint's forums are pretty good nowadays), and it's been an established "Windows jumping-off point" OS for quite a few years now. Zorin is the new kid on the block (while they existed in the past, their quality was nowhere near on par with Mint), so I'd wait and see before checking them out.

Zorin vs Mint comes down to; do you like the color green or blue? Jokes aside they are basically the same. I prefer gnome(zorin) over cinnamon(mint). I also find Zorin does a better job guiding newbs from windows. For example if you would download and run a windows exe, then Zorin will show a pop-up telling the user about alternative Linux apps, or it will handle running windows apps for you through wine.

As a linux newb your choice of distro really doesn't matter too much. Just don't go for difficult stuff like Nix, Gentoo. Desktop Environment is where it's really at for newbs. So try out Kde Plasma, Gnome, Cinnamon and pick the one that you fancy.

Both have an Ubuntu base

Mint develops their own desktop called Cinnamon which is like a cross between Gnome2 and windows 7 UIs. Its looks a bit bland, but some people prefer that.

Zorin uses Gnome3, but is heavily customized to give people a choice between windows 7, windows 10 or MacOS type experiences. The UI does look a lot more modern than mint in the looks department. They also have a commercial support option.

Both have a pretty good suite of software for customization and management.

Personally I'm loving Bazzite, which is Fedora based with a lot of customizations for gaming and modern hardware. It's also immutable, which makes it difficult to break.

zorin is more out of box and mint is lighter. so when you install zorin its going to put in libre office, disk burning, windows rpd, wine with play on linux, its a long list. So it comes down to out of box (I want a bunch of software I may use to be installed along with the os) or lighter and get what you want later. zorin is basically a lazier distro which is why I like it :) while some stuff may be a waste of space I just want it available right away or in a situation where im offline and did not think to install it previously for some reason (disk burning is a good example for this kind of thing)

Zorin and Mint are quite similar in philosophy, Zorin is more “fancy” but Mint is more reliable in my experience (not to say Zorin isn’t, just that it’s har to beet Mint). Any reason for wanting to use Ubuntu? Mint and Zorin are based on Ubuntu so pretty much everything that works on Ubuntu works on Mint/Zorin, most of the instructions for Ubuntu even transfer over

Nyarchlinux is the Linux for you!

https://nyarchlinux.moe/

Honestly I downloaded it as a joke but it’s great

Both are adequate. Both are based on Ubuntu. The biggest difference is going to be the interface.

Zorin has a Gnome-ish interface. If you pay a few extra bucks, you can customize it to make it function like Mac or Windows or Ubuntu, etc. in one click.

Mint has a (in my opinion) much less modern interface that I don't like. But it's also, I believe, the single most popular Linux distro so there will be endless amounts of community support for it.

I would say try a few out, see which DEs (desktop environments, pretty much the part of the OS that you look at) you like. I recommend trying Fedora Workstation (which is GNOME, a purer form of it compared to Ubuntu's flavour, and is unrelated to gnomes of the fantasy world), a KDE Plasma distro (like Kubuntu or Fedora KDE), as well as Mint (which is Cinnamon) and ZorinOS (I think it uses a custom variant of GNOME, but I'm not sure).

You either love or hate GNOME, there's a lot of padding, and it's very "minimal" and "clean". Some people say the UI is similar to Mac in that it has a bar on the top and the "dock" (GNOME's version of the taskbar) looks very similar to Mac. It also has a bunch of touch gestures and such, so it would be good if you have a touchscreen laptop, for example. Make sure to look at GNOME extensions, which helps you customise GNOME to your liking (e.g. transparency, having the dock always be shown kind of like one Windows)

KDE Plasma, out of the box, looks similar to Windows. It, however, is the most customisable and you can change pretty much anything (position of the taskbar, text size of different parts of the UI, colours of all the buttons, etc.) and it's kind of overwhelming. I particularly like KRunner (which is kind of like Spotlight on Mac and lets you search apps, files, settings, etc. straight from the desktop). Currently I'm using KDE Plasma.

Cinnamon is Linux Mint's homegrown take on GNOME, which tries to mimic Windows 10 to ease the transition to Linux. Mint focuses on the usability of its GUI apps, so you won't have to touch the terminal as often (I do recommend you learn how to do simple things like apt to install apps, it's really useful!). If you don't like the excessive padding and touch-optimised design of GNOME or think KDE Plasma isn't for you, Cinnamon might be what you want.

There's also a bunch of other DEs like Xfce (which is lightweight and meant for lower end devices), MATE (which keeps the design of old GNOME, so it looks less "modern" than other DEs), and COSMIC (which is by System76, recently went from Alpha to Beta so it isn't perfectly stable yet, but it looks pretty cool with tiling and such).

Take your time to pick, you can always swap out your DE (that's one of the cool things with Linux, you can literally change the desktop of the entire OS if you want to! It's kind of insane if you think about it. Recently, I switched from GNOME to KDE Plasma with little issue on Fedora. So don't be afraid to pick the "wrong" desktop, you can always change it after the fact! You can even install multiple and choose which one to use when you log in, but that will mean having an excess of default apps, meaning multiple file managers, multiple calendar apps, etc.)