14 DAY TRIAL // Zorin Group is announcing today the release of a Beta version of the upcoming Zorin OS 12 Lite edition of the Ubuntu-based operating system, designed for old computers with low hardware specifications.
The Zorin OS 12 operating system series were revealed last year in November and, since then, the development team published both Business and Education editions with the promise that they are working as fast as possible to also release the Lite edition for those who want to install the Ubuntu-based distro on their old PCs from 5 or even 10-15 years ago.
"With Zorin OS 12 Lite, we have re-thought what the Zorin OS experience can be for low spec machines and computers as old as 14 years," reads today's announcement. "We have built Zorin OS 12 Lite to be a more streamlined concentration of, not a reduction of, the original version, with the same simple user experience, running the same extraordinary apps."
Zorin OS 12 Lite Beta ditches LXDE for the Xfce desktop environment
The biggest change that users will notice after installing the Zorin OS 12 Lite Beta operating system is that it uses the lightweight Xfce desktop environment by default instead of LXDE, which was used in previous releases of the distribution. This allows Zorin OS devs to create a user-friendly, consistent, customizable, intuitive, beautiful, versatile and more extensible experience for Zorin OS Lite.
Of course, Xfce provides the same level of resource usage like LXDE, so it's just perfect for those old computers with only 512MB of RAM. Another new feature of the Zorin OS 12 Lite edition is the integration of the Zorin Appearance in-house built tool by default to let users change the desktop layout to match that of a Microsoft Windows OS with a single mouse click.
macOS-like and GNOME 2 desktop layouts will also be available in the premium edition of Zorin OS 12 Lite after its official release later this month. Under the hood, Zorin OS 12 Lite Beta is based on the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system and ships with the Linux 4.8 kernel from Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), which means that it will be supported with security updates until April 2021.
Zorin OS 12 Lite Beta is available for download right now on our website, but please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that you should not use in a production environment. Ultimate and Business editions of Zorin OS 12 Lite will also be released to accompany the Lite and Lite Education variants, the former being available for purchase only from Zorin OS' online store.
