Wait unti you have to upgrade Zorin to a new release. I still haven’t gotten mine to work. Stick with Mint or Bazzite if you want a Windows alternate

I wouldn't exactly put up Mint as an example for a smooth upgrading experience...
Maybe I lack the technical understanding, but it's absolutely baffling to me, why one has to download mintupgrade. It's a reasonable setup wizard once it's running, but why on earth is that not part of the whole Update tool interface in the first place and gets downloaded automatically?

Free as in Freedom and not free as in beer. I donate to a lot of open-source projects such as KDE.

I'm mostly amazed that they discovered it. When I think of a good transition distro this is not what comes to mind. Must have been some kind of targeted ad campaign. Also there's probably a ton of people that think no good software could possibly be free.

I mean, I don't mind monetization if it keeps the project alive and they're actually doing work. I do mind free stuff that comes at the price of your data, or free stuff that is eventually bought up, or free stuff that can't sustain itself and constantly splits off and churns through personal drama cycles.

To people who will pay whatever they think a thing is worth, a free OS is worthless

so your going with pro then?

Ha, didn't realise Zorin was paid for. I'll stick with Debian. Not only is it free, it was made for lesbians who I also whole heartedly support.

More glitz and glam than many other distros I've tried. It was the first one I tried when trying to leave Windows. Eventually did Mint, Pop, Nobara, and Garuda. Chose Mint to stick with for now and haven't regretted it.

If one of my less savvy friends asked about switching to Linux, I would mention Zorin as a possible option simply because it goes out of its way to feel familiar.

Prettier but has a track record of having more technical issues. Also the devs are a company with absolutely no transparency. At some point there was so few communication that I thought they closed shop.

If you want a similar UI, I would advise going for a vanilla Gnome and adding the desired "Zorin *" extensions. It's a bunch more work to setup but it feels more trustworthy to me.

out of box distro so it comes with a bunch of software pre installed. .

Uses Gnome instead of Cinnamon, has a paid version, that's all the differences I can think of

It's a defuckulated Ubuntu with a a dozen custom Gnome extensions. They do publish the extensions code. It exists because Mint is often ugly and not very ergonomic. See the "file" apps for both distros, Mint's buttons are too small and the progress indicator is a tiny 16px icon in the status bar.

The Pro edition is basically a donate button that gets you a few themes and applications that you can just as easily install from Flathub.

Core is free. And then you install the apps to make it like Pro. Some people like everything done for them, and some businesses won't approve free software for use, as it has a stigma of being sketchy, so adding a paid version can get this past your chief technical officer at a corporation.

There's nothing wrong with giving money to FOSS projects.

In fact, a major issue with the open source world is users never donating.

I've never used Zorin and don't intend to, but the existence of optional paid software isn't why.

The answer to your question which sounds like a statment is no.