I'm using Zorin
I replaced Windows on one of my machines-my laptop- because I have no need for Windows on it.
And Zorin is great for most routine tasks.
But with Zorin, as with other 'Nuxes I've tried- straying too far from the marked path leads straight into the swamplands.
And the swamp lands have two components. One is that something just won't work in what I'd think of as a reasonable and logical way and the other is that either there won't be any advice covering that particular issue, though there will be lots that sound the same until I read them and find they're actually referring to some niche edge case; or more often (in my experience) the helpful advice found online to resolve that problem won't quite correspond to what I'm facing. Typically the latter will be an instruction to open something in settings and navigate to a submenu then clink on an item.... but the submenu will have all the items helpfully shown in a screenshot- except the one I apparently need to resolve the problem won't be there . The helpful item was, maybe written two+ years previously but has never been updated. Maybe the functionality I sought has been moved, or maybe removed.
So...With Zorin I wanted to navigate to a shared folder on my main Windows PC. Then choose some photos to bring across.
The nice big Windows Network icon in the file manger doesn't do anything when you click on it (I'm sure it must have a purpose, but it's not obvious what that might be). What I'd hoped to see was that shared folders on the Windows PC would appear as folders in the file manager. Or that the GUI would allow me to navigate to the network location that is the Windows PC and thence to the shared folder. But that didn't work. Searching online I found I needed to to use SMB://pathname instead. But that didn't work.Searching online I found some suggestions that I needed to install the SMB first. I did that. It didn't work. There was a few suggestions that I needed to "mount" my Windows folder ( the suggestion was that I should create a folder specially on the Zorin machine to mount the Windows folder in.And put anything I waned to share into that. Which was no use to me at all. Another delve on the internet and I found some suggestions that I needed to install ( with sudo) something that was a collection of letters. I did that. And then the SMB worked. Though I still had to put in some information in a dialogue box that was slightly ambiguous as to what was required. And then, at last, with SMB://pathname I was looking at the contents of a shared folder. As icons. tens of jpg files with unhelpful file names. And generic icons, but no thumbnails to let me see what each picture was. I pulled a few pictures across, just to see if it worked. It did. Fine. And on my Zorin machine I could then see the thumbnails. But not on the remote PC. Viewing pictures on a shared Windows folder can't use thumbnail view in Zoriin it appears. Though finding this out took a lot of internet searching ( and it may not even be true, since I couldn't find anything definitive).
But even simple things like making the useless, almost invisible, scroll bars more usable were difficult, if not impossible to find. As it happens, hovering over the pitifully tiny, barely visible scroll bar makes them become more prominent, almost to the point of being easy to use.