An Post (Ireland's Postal Service) - is the pits...

 More venting I'm afraid, this time, it's regarding our much maligned postal carrier, An Post - 'The Post' in Gaelic, to the uninitiated!

 First, the backdrop.   Way back in January 2021, I ordered an Atari ST USB transfer interface from a guy in the Czech Republic, namely, the PARCP-USB adapter.  A couple of months passed, no package, but as the 'sc@mdemic' was in full swing, I figured this was the reason, so patiently waited some more.  Alas, in vain.

 No biggie, I figured, the package had a Tracking number after all.  And tracked it was, at least on the Czech side, the carrier having acknowledged receipt & dispatch of my order to the Emerald Isle.  But no further - it never found its way onto An Post's tracking system.

 I contacted the Seller, who promptly got onto the Czech postal carrier, and relayed back to me that said carrier would contact An Post, who in turn would contact me.  More months passed, but eventually I did get a letter via snail-mail from An Post requesting a signed & returned form to them, acknowledging the non-receipt of the Czech package.  This I did.

 Fast forward another 9 months to today, a full 15 months since the order had been placed.  With no further follow-up from An Post, I attempted to submit a Lost Package request via their web-site, only to discover that either their system hasn't been updated since the 80's, or that they are deliberately trying to limit the number of successful Lost Package submissions to a minimum.  The problem? - An Post doesn't appear to realise that most online ordering these days doesn't require the buyer to submit, or even have knowledge of the Sellers address & telephone number - BUT INSISTS THAT THESE BE PROVIDED IN ORDER TO PROCEED!!!  This is insanity.  Had I ordered from Ebay, Aliexpress or Amazon, would I be expected to source name & address details for any of these behemoths?!?!?  Or in my case, from a small commercial Seller.

 So, Unable to proceed any further on that front, as a last resort I turned to An Post's online-help - and what a farce that turned out to be.  After trying to explain all of the above 'live', and in as concise a manner as 'live-help' will allow, I was told flatly that there was no trace of my order "on their system", and that the Seller probably hadn't even sent it! Exasperated, despite having told (typed) to bubble-head "Paulina" that it was the Czech Carrier that had contacted An Post (not me) about the missing package, and that An Post had then sent me the letter, requiring acknowledgement of non-receipt of package!!! - indication enough I thought, that the Seller had indeed posted my order, and that the Czech carrier had indeed passed it onto An Post - but all of this was lost on poor "Paulina".  If it wasn't on "their system" I was told again, then it 'obviously' hadn't been sent in the first place!  I started to type that if it was on their system, it wouldn't have been lost and I wouldn't be here trying to explain the obvious to her - when in mid-sentence, I'd had enough, and typed "...never mind, fuck off!" and disconnected!  But not before their automated 'cuss-word detection spat back that "abuse" would not be tolerated and that the infringement had "been noted".  This at least gave me a laugh.

 An Post is clearly an institution more worried about its bottom-line, than about helping its customers.  Any company whose sole response is to deny all responsibility for a missing package, by citing "well, it's not on our system, so we can't have received it.", despite the loss having been initially brought to their attention by a fellow postal-carrier, deserves to fail.  I've ended up losing €50, but I can easily envisage An Post losing quite a bit more, and deservedly so.  I just hope it won't be at the tax-payers expense.

Edit.

 I forgot to include what triggered my potty-mouth, the straw that turned exasperation into infuriation.  'Paulina' had the gal to insist, more than once, that it was the Seller, not the Buyer (me!) that should be requesting this information from her, and that I should instead be communicating with him - which I took as short-hand for, "Just go away & stop bothering me!"  But if this is 'company policy', and not just bubble-head having a blonde-moment, then it is indeed sad.

 Final Edit.

 I took one last stab at this and filed a complaint with An Post.

To whom it may concern.

An Post lost a package (value €50) containing an item at I ordered from the Czech Republic, order placed on 23/01/2021.  This was while the COVID hysteria was in full swing, and I presumed the parcel had merely been delayed - but after 6 months, it still hadn't arrived. (Seller's name: Petr Stehlík <pstehlik@sophics.cz>)

I know An Post lost it because the Seller, on hearing that I still had not received the item, contacted the Czech Postal Service, who informed him that they had handed it off to An Post - the package's online-tracking, available to me at the time,  seemed to confirm as much.

The Czech Postal Service also told the Seller that they would contact An Post, who would in turn, contact me about this.

This An Post eventually did (after about 6 months) in the form of a letter asking me to return a 'parcel-not-received'  form to them, confirming that I had not received the package in question.  This I promptly did.

Then nothing.  An Post never followed up on this.

As a last resort, I recently tried to resolve this issue via An Post's online-chat service, which proved to be a fiasco.  I tried explaining all of the above to the person I communicated with, but they had either a limited attention-span, or more likely, were merely working from a prepared script designed to fob people off.  Nothing was achieved but the raising of my blood pressure. 

Question.
How can An Post, simply shirk off any responsibility for a package that gets lost, when online-tracking at the time confirmed what the Czech Postal Service had asserted - namely, that they had successfully handed it over to An Post?  Remember, it was An Post that contacted me about this initially, not my contacting them, and after they had been contacted by the Czech Postal Service.  This in itself is a clear indication that the parcel went missing after it had been handed over to An Post.  The online-help(!) person I spoke to had the gal to state, several times, that if it wasn't 'on the system', then it COULDN'T have been received - so, An Post's omnipotent now...  She went on to state that neither was there a record of the form of non-receipt that I had returned to An Post, "on the system".  If that truly is the case, then that's two letters, not just the Czech parcel, that An Post has managed to 'lose', at least in the shirking responsibility sense.

There is no doubt in my mind that the parcel was lost by An Post.  The fact that An Post contacted me, seeking confirmation that I had not received it, is evidence of such.  But what was the point in having me return a non-receipt form, if policy is just to ignore it?

Respectfully,

xxxx

 Unlike their follow-up on my missing parcel, their almost instant response was succinct and to the point.

Good evening xxxx, 

 

Any package or item that goes missing or is failed to deliver has to be investigated by the sender of the item through the original postal service. 

 

The letter sent to you to confirm non receipt is done to be sent back to the original postal service in the Czech Republic. We would have no further dealing with yourself and would only engage with the postal service in the Czech Republic who would engage with the sender of the item. It is then the sender of the items job to engage with you for any further dealings. 

 

We cannot do anything further for you. 
 

Kind Regards

 

Aaron

Customer Services

 At least I appreciate that they responded quickly, giving me a straight answer, unlike that useless drone I communicated with via live-chat.  In a nutshell, on-line Tracking is a mere courtesy, and even if, (as here), it strongly suggests that it was An Post that lost my package, it has no value in proving culpability - basically if An Post loses a non-insured package, it's a case of...

 'TOUGH LUCK CHUMP!!!'

Wavepad And its Shortcomings...

 With a mammoth fortnight of experience using Wavepad under my belt, I thought I'd share my musings on a few things about it that rub me the wrong way, though I should preface any criticisms by saying that Wavepad is by far, the best audio-editing software I've come across to date, making one of the most tedious parts of producing small or large audio-books, now a doddle.

 As mentioned in my previous post, on my setup, (little RAM, no SSD space available), with large WAV files, Wavepad is slow.  As also mentioned, this is compounded by the fact that it has to use a hard-disk as its cache, but given that this drive is relatively fast (90-100MB/s), it seems slower than it should be.  This sluggish performance is exacerbated when you try adding other available editing options to the mix.

 For instance, Wavepad allows files to be split at 'silences' that it detects in the audio file.  I was almost salivating when I first realised that this feature existed, only to end up despondent when I saw just how slow it rendered the Split process.  Worse, this, ’splitting at silences' doesn't appear to be done intelligently.  While I appreciate that scanning for silences may be inherently slow, the split-files that Wavepad ends up producing, vary widely in length - by as much as 20 min for the 6 hour audio-book (split into 3 pieces) that I created as a test.  Given that there is an option for the user to specify the duration of silences that are sought out, as well as the split-number, what ought to happen is that Wavepad should first calculate the split-points, then search forward & backward from these points, until it finds the nearest appropriate silence.  What it actually appears to do is to scan the entire file for silences, which is idiotic, particularly given that 'synthetic voices' like that produced by the AT&T speech engine, which Natural Reader (NR) uses, introduce silences of precise duration into their WAV files, which should make end-of-sentence silences, quick & easy to detect.  Wavepad's shoddy 'split-on-silences' implementation renders the whole notion impractical, given the "rough", (Wavepad's description), split-file lengths that it produces.  At a minimum, Wavepad should place 'moveable' split-points, thereby allowing the user to shift them manually to nearby silences, prior to splitting.  Alas, this 'obvious' functionality is only noteworthy by its absence.

 Moving on, its next bug-bear involves multi-threading, or in Wavepad’s case, lack thereof.  This is one area where, on a multi-core PC, Wavepad should really shine, specifically, simultaneously encoding the core-based number of split-files into their mp3/ogg etc. equivalents.  What it actually does is encode, one part at a time, which is ridiculous.

 Last on the chopping block is its Audio-tags implementation.  After producing a few audio-books with Wavepad, I noticed that when some of them were opened with the VLC media-player, instead of displaying the file by its (renamed) filename, it uses the WAV-file name that NR generated, basically a string of numbers.  These I discovered were being saved by NR as audio-tags, and Wavepad was happily writing these non-descripts to the split-files, which VLC then (bizarrely) used as labels during playback, rather than the actual filenames.  Thankfully, Wavepad allows Audio-tags to be cleared, so after saving/reloading the WAV-file, things work as they should.  But it's just one more unnecessary step that needs doing.

 Nevertheless, Wavepad is an excellent piece of software.  Another huge plus for me is that it runs almost flawlessly on Linux Wine as well.

 As an aside, I've just come across another Windoze app that has left me rather impressed - Atlantis Word Processor.  This tiny 5Meg word-processor is fast & feature-rich while also seeming to run flawlessly on Wine.  I had been using the snazzy-looking Chinese WPS as my word-processor of choice on Linux for years, but only realised a few days ago that accented letters such as 'é', are unceremoniously deleted from the text-body when the file is loaded... - WTF?!?!?  Bewildered by this butchery, I promptly removed it and installed Libre Office 5 instead - only to discover that this had so many (unrelated) problems, that I'd do better to look elsewhere - and that's where Atlantis W.P. came in!  Were I to nit-pick, the only thing missing from it is the ability to import ePub texts - particularly since Atlantis already allows exportation in this format.  In truth Atlantis W.P. supports relatively few W.P. standards, DOC, DOCX & RTF, being the main ones, but the latter is the only one I'm interested in, the result of my e-book to audio-book conversion preoccupation.

 

 

Wayne Green's blog...

 This is one of those unplanned posts that presented itself as I looked for solutions while converting yet-another e-book to an audio book.  The book, The Urantia Book, the problem, it's HUGE, over 3000 pages, and coming in at a fraction under 80 hours of audio!  Up until then, the largest e-book I'd converted, came in at around 35 hours - and that was a mammoth task to do 'manually'.

 Normally, after making the text-body from the e-book 'presentable' (add punctuation, remove Super/Subscripts etc.), I use NaturalReader, running on my Win7 box, to convert it to WAV files, then use the Linux app. Wavbreaker, to first merge these files into one, then split the resultant into same-sized chunks that make for easy listening, each approximately between 1.5 to 2 hours of audio.  I used to convert with NaturalReader running a VirtualBox'ed WinXP on Linux, producing 100's of audio books in this way with the setup, until I saw reason - it was way too slow.

 Anyway, the problem I was experiencing with Wavbreaker was, unsurprisingly, file-size, and was compounded by the fact that my OS of choice, is of the 32-bit variety.  An easy fix, or so I thought, was to use Wavbreaker on my 64-bit Deepin setup to do the deed, only to be disgusted to discover that Wavbreaker was never upgraded to avail of the advantages of 64-bit addresses.  Undaunted, I then decided I'd go 'old-school' and merge & split my WAV-files from Deepin's Bash terminal.

 And that really pissed me off - the discovery that both 'sox' or 'ffmpeg', run on a modern 64-bit Linux OS, fail miserably to split Wav files that are over 4Gig in size - completely unacceptable in 2022.  The TUB text produces a Wav-file that's almost 13Gig.

 That's when I went looking for a Windoze alternative and discovered Wavepad - and which is most excellent!  It allows me to merge or split huge files in one go, something that was impossible with the crippled Wavbreaker app.  The only downside is that in operation, with huge Wav-files, it is rather slow.  Since I've only got 8Gig of computer RAM (7.2Gig available for use) and don't have any SSD space left, Wavepad is forced to use my external 6TB USB disk-drive as its cache - so it's no surprise that it's slow.

 But onto the point of this post.  While getting familiar with Wavepad's capabilities, I came across a large Wav-file that I'd generated years ago, of Wayne Green's blog posts.  Who's Wayne Green I hear you ask? - click here for info.  I personally came across him around 2008-09, probably as a result of him having been a guest on C2C radio on several occasions.  I somehow happened upon his frequently-updated blog, and since I found it quite entertaining, decided to make an audio book of it.  This spanned from 2004 up until 2013, when Wayne Green croaked, so it's fairly lengthy, coming in at about 53 hours of audio.  I actually emailed Wayne Green back in the day to see if he was interested in using my converted audio-files on his site.  I really didn't expect a response, but respond he did, promptly as well, which surprised me, but in the negative, no, he didn't want my audio-files - which surprised me not!

 While playing with Wavepad as mentioned above, I was pleased to find that it supported conversion of audio files to the Opus format.  It annoys me that most of the Windows apps that I've tried, don't support it, which really is a shame as technically, it's wonderful - royalty-free, with minuscule latency and intelligible audio-encodes at a miserly 6kB/s.  I just wish I could find a cheap, dedicated mp3 player that supports it as well. I've used Wavepad to split Wayne Green's blog-audio into 40 Opus pieces, each 1.5 hours in duration & have uploaded them here to my Google Drive, on the off-chance there may be somebody interested in listening to some of them.

 I'll finish up with a few comments on Wayne Green himself.  First, he was a 'know-it-all', to which he would no doubt have responded, "I know!".  With an IQ purported as being over 200, maybe he was, and although his Art Bell C2C spots were entertaining, they get monotonous after a while - he basically used to read a LOT (1-2 books a week) then regurgitate what he'd read on Art's show.  Art Bell apparently found it tiring eventually as it stopped being a regular gig, and Wayne moaned continuously about it in his blog, cajoling readers to contact C2C and ask for his return.  Never happened.  Also, he continuously harped on about 'cold-fusion' being a 'done-deal', both on C2C and in his blog, yet he never once mentioned trying it out for himself, despite being a bit of an electronics-wiz.  I got the impression that whatever he'd read, became Gospel, the 'real-deal' - at least until he read another book that contradicted that belief...  

 His other 'obsessions', referred to ad-nauseam throughout his blog, concerned vaccines, schooling, diet and the medical system.  He repeatedly relayed how he went out of his way to communicate with a sick Steve Jobs so that he could provide him with a cancer-cure, but failed to break through the wall of 'minders' that surrounded him.  To say he was critical of current-day healthcare is an understatement.  Yet, despite this vitriolic opinion, when push came to shove towards the end of his life, he ignored all the advice he had offered to others, and instead went with doctor-recommended treatments - then bitched & moaned at their incompetence when things didn't go according to plan (well, he died...).  He seemed to have been a 'do as I say, not as I do' type individual.

 Lastly, a memory.  When Wayne died, there was the expected influx of gushing emails from friends posted on his site.  One 'friend' stated his intention to maintain Wayne site as a memorial of sorts, 'for the foreseeable future' - which I thought admirable.  What actually happened was that just a few months later, the site was gone!  I remember thinking at the time, "With friends like that, who needs enemies."

 Anyway, as the above link shows, Wayne Green's site IS still available online, but on the Wayback Machine.

Wayne Green blog (audio-files)

'cartakeback.ie': legit or a scam - the jury's out...

 A quick 'IMHO' on these imbeciles.  I have an old Corolla, though well past its 'sell-by-date', runs and is in good nick generally - though sitting idle for over a year now, so surplus to requirements.

Similarly, I had a Peugeot 306 a couple of years ago, also sitting idle, and generally, in good condition, but being too lazy to search out Buyers, ended up just selling it to a local scrap-merchant for a €40 - this may be of interest later!

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I came across 'cartakeback.ie' on the internet, opted for their 'Instant Quote' for the Corolla, and was pleasantly surprised to be offered €309 for my 00 reg. Corolla, which included the collection-fee.  Were I to deliver it to their premises, relatively close-by, the Quote increased by just €5-€7.  I also asked for a Peugeot-Quote - a car long since sold and broken for parts - fully expecting to be told that the car had already been scrapped.  Didn't happen, they actually Quoted me even more for it - €320 & change - which made no sense!  So I emailed them about it,  only to be told that I'd need to get onto the Department Of Transport for further information.

Never mind, the Corolla I still owned, and I presumed the offer was legit, so I thought, bye-bye Corolla.  As its battery was flat and a rear brake-caliper was sticking, I felt it didn't qualify as being "accessible" (cartakeback.ie's term) enough for ease of collection.  It took a week or so to rectify the situation and in the interim, the "Guaranteed" quote had expired - the Quotes given are valid for just 7 days.

No problem, I just applied for another Quote, same car details etc.  This time however, the amount offered had nose-dived to €200 for the same car,  collection included.  Miffed, I emailed 'cartakeback' about the huge price variation, only to be told that their current offer was a reflection of market prices, plus Christmas was almost upon us etc...

Jaded but undaunted, one week later & mostly for a laugh, I requested another Quote for both cars, opting to have the Quote emailed to me.  This time the offer for both cars was the same, €300.  However, below the emails "Guaranteed" money offer, was a "Retrieve Quote" button, which when clicked, saw both quoted prices plummet to €200.

One email to 'cartakeback' later, I learned two things, first, the "Guaranteed" €300 should in fact be read as "up to €300", and second, the €300 offer applied only to cars that were being dropped off at their facility by the Seller.  This ad-hoc policy shift is clearly horseshit, as the first quote I got from them, had a price differential of just a few Euro for cars collected versus being dropped off by the seller.

It would appear that cartakeback's Quoted offers are meaningless.  They just quote a figure that they feel potential punters will find attractive - despite stating that their Quotes are "Guaranteed" prices - then low-ball them, by any & all means necessary.  I raised this in my email to them but it was just ignored.  

 

 

Edit.

 Six months on, I requested yet another quote for the same old Corolla car a week or two ago and was 'Guaranteed' €250 this time round.  Seeing as I had to get rid of it as there's a move in the offing, I accepted.

 The First agreed Collection-date came & went.  The Collection-time had been vague - between 11:00am and 4:00pm - and I had spent 6 hours waiting, before losing patience & phoning them.  "No, it won't be collected today, sorry!"  Exasperated, I arranged another date, set for a few days later.  That date also came & went without them making an appearance.  I did however get a phone-call this time, at around 3:00pm, apologising for the inconvenience.  A third date for collection was offered & agreed upon - and third-time proved the charm!

 Their Collection-Driver was an amiable individual and had the car hooked up & spirited off in a few minutes - quite professional.  He paid in cash as well, so no complaints there either.  For a car that I had paid €6,000 for back in 2006, that had only 120,000 genuine miles on it, and never had broken down & was still running perfectly, €250 seemed way too little.  That said, I had tried selling it on DoneDeal a couple of years ago, for a measly €400 and failed, so maybe I should be thankful it's gone.

 While it never broke down, it suffered from Toyota's infamous oil-ring problem from the get-go, requiring that the engine-oil level be monitored & topped-up frequently - doing that for 14 years proved a real bummer!  After two years of driving my current car, it's still a novelty to find, come an oil/filter change, the oil-level, reading 'Max' on the dip-stick.

Raspberry Pi - Raspbian OS.

  Just a quick comment on the Raspberry Pi, or its OS rather.  Although I had promised myself that I'd upgrade my long-in-the-tooth Pi 3B+ to a Pi 4, complacency and general laziness intervened.  On the one hand, since its main use is as a media-server, the added 'Ooomph' of a Pi 4 is probably not needed - the only media-streaming situation where the 3B+ really struggles is with 1080+ HEVC video - though its lack of memory (1Gig) and abysmal Bluetooth support has always been a major bug-bear.

  I had waited for years for the BT issue to be resolved, or at least its problems mitigated, alas in vain.  When I realised that the OS itself was no longer being supported, and worse, the repositories themselves had been taken down, I felt saddened at its abandonment by Raspbian - and that I was going to have to shell out for a Pi 4.

Then I discovered that the brand-spanking new OS release available for free from Raspbian's site is backward-compatible with pretty much every piece of hardware that they've released, and all was right with the world again!!!

 Even better, they finally have a BT implementation that is pretty close to perfect - at least in operation - I'm not a fan of its UI-accessibility one bit - right-clicking the speaker-icon, left-click output selection, then another left-click to finally select the BT device - way, way too convoluted!  Clicking the BT icon itself reveals a non-working means of doing the same thing - so it's obviously a work-in-progress.  But once a BT device is selected, it works almost perfectly!  One annoyance I've found is that on start-up, although it will automatically connect to the last BT device used (if present), I invariably have to manually select the BT output device for the app in question (VLC, for instance)  via the Pulseaudio Control application.

The other huge deal (for me) with the new OS is that VLC now has graphics hardware support by default - no more manually building VLC or searching online for working links to builds.

All in all, I'm very happy with the OS upgrade.  The only thing I'd criticise is Raspbian's continuing insistence that users be tied to that awful TrueVNC.  I don't care if its developer originated 'VNC' - this is Linux we're talking about, 'freedom of choice' and all that.  Currently, rather than having the sane option of using Remmina to access my Pi media-server via my laptop, I either have to 'ssh' onto it if terminal-access will do, or fire up the wide-screen that's connected to it and use a tiny (read, 'uber-cheap') BT keypad.  I can control all of my other computers & OS's using Remmina, why not the Pi??!?

Remmina's site FAQ even acknowledges the problem with Pi's, yet doesn't offer a solution (read, link to working s/w) just a 'solution' that's non-working and/or outdated:

 FOR THE LOVE OF SANITY, UPDATE THIS PAGE!!!

Zorin 16 Review (Linux distro)...

  I think this is my first Linux Distro (mini) review ever.  But after watching a Zorin 16 review on the Youtube channel, ‘Explaining Computers’, which handed out a solid ‘RECOMMENDED!!!’, and seeing the ‘Distrowatch’ internet site giving it a 8.5 out of 10 rating, I felt compelled to post, if only to blow off steam.

  Zorin is actually a commercial package, the developer asking £39 Sterling for the 'Professional' version.  The 'Core' version I'm commenting on is available free-of-charge, and according to the Explaining Computers review, is essentially the same as  the Pro version, minus some installed (though freely available for download) software packages and User-support from Zorin.  So, yes, I’ve installed Zorin, mainly out of curiosity, based on the overly positive review by ‘Explaining Computers’.  In fact, I'm typing this from Zorin, using the excellent Libre Office that’s provided.  I remember, back in the 90’s, paying for my first introduction to Linux – Suse Linux, at around £30 – and feeling slightly embarrassed for the community at the word-processing package that was supplied.  It worked ok, it was just that the user-interface was well below par when compared to the M$ Word offering at the time.  But that was the past, Libre Office is a well-polished piece of software that is a pleasure to use.

  And apart from that one positive point, it’s going to be all down-hill from here!  Wait, I’ll make it two – I was really impressed at how fast Zorin ‘can’ close down the computer – I emphasise ‘can’ for a reason - 1st time it switched off the computer really rapidly, next shutting-down, the system just hung and I had to hit the ‘Reset’ button, so there’s that...

  Anyway, after first backing up my prized Deepin 20 installation using Terabyte, I installed Zorin over it, on the partition where it resides.  I did this ‘cos I had initially tried installing it on my old laptop – Dell M1210, 2006 vintage, ‘only’ 4GB (3.2 usable) of RAM etc. - but that ended in failure, for the same reason I’m sure I’ve commented on here previously.  You see, a ‘regression’ (sic) introduced into the Linux kernel years ago (shortly after Mint 17.3’s debut)  which has never been rectified, results in kernels newer than 2.6.32.74 (Mint 17.3) failing to even detect the SSD in use. Long story...

  The Zorin installation is on a AMD 5350-based computer, so definitely not what you’d call a powerhouse – yet it’s the best I’ve got!  It’s one plus is that it has 8GB RAM (7.2 usable), so no memory issues, which is just as well.

  So after just a couple hours using Zorin (though ‘enduring’ seems more apt), it's time to cite its shortcomings. 

1:  It’s got possibly the worst boot-screen I’ve ever seen – all black & white, with an overly-large font – looks like something you’d have seen running on a ‘286 in the 80’s.
2:  Out of the gate, it uses at least 900MB of RAM, with a ‘new-to-me’ 600MB+ of ‘Cache’ memory also in use.  Why not just say it needs 1.5GB just to boot and be done with it!
3:  Although it seems to recognise my hardware, it fails to set the max screen resolution – the max it provides is 1024 x 768, my old monitor is capable of 1360 x 768.  Deepin sets it properly, Zorin should too!
4:  It doesn’t detect the integrated Bluetooth of my 7260AC wireless card.  In fairness neither does Deepin.  It’s a disgrace that cards of this popularity, which work (BT included) fine on EOL platforms such as Mint 17.3, no longer do on so-called ‘improved’ Linux kernels.
5:  Even an external ‘universal’ Bluetooth dongle doesn’t work!  It detects it, will with difficulty 'pair' with my BT headset, but that’s as far as I can get.  The installed BT s/w, that’s part of Gnome 3.xx is abysmal, and always has been.  Deepin’s heavily based on Gnome 3.xx so suffers similarly.  That’s the reason my first act whenever I’m confronted with Gnome 3.xx is to install Blueman.  Works well with Deepin, can’t get it to work at all with Zorin – a first!  Installs fine.  With BT disabled, Blueman’s icon is visible.  Click it, select ‘Enable BT’ and the icon disappears from the taskbar!  Try getting it to show itself by running it from the programs Menu also fails, periodically throwing up a pop-up, explaining that the connection to Bluez failed, and therefore it cannot continue!  Bloody infuriating!!!
6:  The Software manager UI sucks.  It’s got the same spartan appearance you see at boot-time – all B&W, depressing as hell.

  And the above is just after 2 hours of (ab)use.  I’m afraid of what I’d discover with extended use.  Believe it or not, I’m not even having a go at Zorin here.  The underlying problems are caused by crap like Gnome 3.xx.  I recall the (justified) backlash to it when it first came out, also the Developers wildly optimistic ‘Roadmap’ – they were supposed to have version 4 up & running 2014-2016 if memory serves.  Yet here we are, 2022 on the horizon, still 3.xx and it still sucks!  The fact that these clowns can’t provide an even usable BT solution this far down the line really baffles me though!  One of the biggest complaints way back when was their insistence in ‘dumbing-down’ the UI.  Well, 10+ years later, nothing has changed.  The BT configurability that's provided is almost non-existent, and providing an unusable BT experience, for me anyway.

  The fact that Gnome 3.xx is the future of Linux doesn’t bode well for Linux.  But we're stuck with it, it seems.  On the upside, Deepin Linux is in fact based on Gnome 3.xx though heavily modified – thank the Lord – but as they say, a pig with lipstick is still a pig.  And despite the almost apologetic tone from reviewers for daring to say something favourable about a Chinese Linux distro, Deepin is thee most polished Linux OS out there, for quite a while - if not, since forever - the pig it's built on of course, not withstanding!

  Summing up.  I’m sick & tired of superficial ‘reviews’ such as are being supplied by the likes of ‘Explaining Computers’ and Distrowatch.  They are little more than a Bells & Whistles summation, with little or no real-world review of the OS’s provided features being done.  Distrowatch I get, has to remain positive about the state of Linux, come what may, it’s their bread & butter after all.  Then there’s the kernel developers.  Bugs are introduced that will more likely than not, EVER be fixed.  The affected user is left with little choice but to suck it up.  Despite this, the number of ‘new’ Linux distros being released doesn’t seem to be abating, despite 90% of them offering nothing on what’s already available.  Cynical old me is beginning to conclude most are doing it for the money – in the form of donations – that successful distros tend to bring in. 

In conclusion, I'm not impressed with Zorin and it definitely doesn't warrant paying £39 for it, and that's excluding VAT as well!  By all means, install it and check it out, or alternatively, try it out online here - I wish I had!!!  I may play with the installed version a bit more, given the effort I've already put into getting it up & running, but its days are numbered.
 

Addendum.

True to my word, or NOT, as in this instance, I still have Zorin installed, on not one, but two computers.  Not an endorsement by any means either!  I had spent so much time trying to get it working properly on my 'good' machine (AMD 5350) that I figured, what was there to lose trying it on my mini-itx Intel Atom quad-core pc - only more time, as it turned out!

The Intel pc also has just 2Gig of memory, so I expected that Zorin would refuse to install, not, as it happens.  Neither does it boot successfully - the current Linux kernel just doesn't like the integrated Nvidia graphics that it finds, refusing to start Xorg.  After a huge amount of time, I discovered that if I booted in recovery-mode, dropped to the root-terminal and tried starting X manually, it still threw up the same 'refresh-rate' error, but would eventually start X-server.  Once up, I then found that I could switch over to Wayland, with which, the problem disappeared.

Despite this 'success', Zorin proved effectively unusable with 2Gig of ram.  Not a shocker given that the Gnome 3.xx garbage still grabs most of the memory anyway - I had been curious though to see if Gnome, on seeing how little memory was available (only 1.73Gig after the Bios has had its nibble) would curtail its voracious appetite somewhat - no such luck!  Load an instance of Firefox, and things grind to a halt and the system locks up.  So yeah, unusable.

Ever indefatigable, I then decided to see if Zorin Lite would work on the 2Gig machine.  This is in effect Zorin 15.  Things didn't start well - the very same Nvidia graphics bug exists with the Lite version!  I also have to go through the same rigamarole to get to boot as root, sans Wayland however, so not a usable solution long-term.  Once achieved, I was treated to a user-interface that is really spartan in appearance.  Yet despite the 'Lite' moniker, Gnome still insists in gobbling up well over 1Gig of the available ram.  The only plus was that the system didn't hang when I then ran Firefox.

Having had my fill of Zorin Lite, I wiped it from existence by restoring the Zorin 16 backup (via Terabyte) that I had made, over it, then installed Zorin 16 on my AMD 5350 machine instead - at least here Gnome 3.xx would have 8Gig to play with.

Different machine, different problems, though thankfully not graphics-related.  Here my memory constraints are SSD-related, having just a puny 120Gigs to play with.  I was forced to split the partition occupied by Deepin Linux, but in the knowledge that thanks to Terabyte, reverting back to how things were, wouldn't be an issue if/when Zorin proved more trouble than it was worth.

And that is pretty much where it stands.  Zorin 16 runs ok on the AMD setup.  Since this is the 'Core' version of a commercial offering, there are some limitations, and one of those is the number of UI setups that are available.  Of those that are, none contain a 'Clear desktop' method - this is unacceptable.  The other thing that really rubs me the wrong way concerns Wine.  While Zorin offers "Windows support", the word "Wine" is never mentioned.  So, despite the entirety of this "Windows support" being provided by the Wine Project, those good people never seem to be outwardly given any credit by the Zorin developer.  This fact is exacerbated after you have manually installed Wine and tried running a M$ program - Zorin interjects, each and every time, with a pop-up, warning you that you are about to run a Windoze program (Duh!) and do you wish to continue.  Again, the backbone of all of this functionality is Wine-based, yet not a mention of this, as far as Zorin is concerned.  Yep, it grinds my gears. 

As mentioned, Deepin 20 is also built on Gnome 3.xx.  Therefore, I challenge anyone to compare & contrast the two operating systems.  IMO, Deepin wins hands-down in almost every category.

One thing I will add in conclusion.  Given the appalling performance issues I've experienced with Zorin on the 2gig Intel system, as well as having recently become curious at how good Cloud-based OCR'ing has become, I downloaded & installed Windows 8.1 (which 'UI-Path' lists as a pre-requisite) onto it.  I had never played with Windows 8.x before, so the fact that it even installed onto such a low-spec, 2008-era machine, was a surprise.  Even more so that I can also browse the i-net without issues.  The fact that UI-Path (a 500Meg download) installs & runs perfectly, albeit very slowly, even with a concurrent instance of Firefox, is amazing.  I have in fact, just ordered from Amazon, a 2Gig of DDR2 ram-stick for all of £6 Sterling, in the hope that whatever remains after being BIOS-SODIMM'ised may facilitate a worthwhile speed-boost!  Contrast this with the fact that I can barely get Zorin to run on the same hardware...

Methinks I may have pre-judged Windows 8.x a mite harshly - a late realisation I know!  But I do hate all of those stupid menu-items, as well as that awful M$ Store you need to register with to even install software.  I've actually tried 3 time thus far to register, only to be told right at the end of the registration process, that it failed and to try again later - Grrrr.  To my credit, I did download & install Windows 10 at one time, for a look & feel.  I wasn't impressed.  It appears that Windows 8.1 is quite a benign OS in comparison.

More Chinese FAKE Components shenanigans...

 Though many of my posts start off by saying that they'll be short, then end up anything but, this I promise shall be to the point - therefore, short!

 I ordered 10 2n3819 N-FET's well over a year ago but didn't have a reason to call one into service until today.  While they look exactly as they should, lazar-etched as well, they are not what they claim.

 They turn out to be NPN transistors, not FETs!!!  Below is a (poor) photo of a fake 2n3819 (left) along side the genuine article (right), along with both component-tester's results.

 Those pesky orientals really grind my gears at times.