I hope you know you've earned the title Linux pro my friend. Installing linux on apple hardware is a challenge, installing a linux OS without support for the architecture/arm on apple hardware is truly triumph. Even if you don't believe it i bestow upon you an honorary title of Linux pro. Be well, and be free friend!
Well, to be fair, I didn't install Zorin OS onto an M1 Mac. It's running under a UTM (QEmu) Virtual Machine. I am, however, surprised that I got Zorin OS Core running on an ARM Machine, at all. I'm even more surprised that I've done it before anyone has documented it online. There are plenty of questions about an ARM version and M1 Virtualization on Zorin's official forum, but they usually go unanswered. From the initial forum posts I used to get my leverage, most people seemed to conclude that Zorin OS Lite would work just fine, but attempting to install Zorin OS Core over top of Ubuntu Server ARM resulted in dependency issues. I got this issues at first too, but after trying and trying again, I realize that Ubuntu Server 20.04's own repositories didn't contain the app versions that Zorin OS was looking for when attempting to install. I realized that Zorin's devs probably had to implement these in repositories of their own, and I was right. I found the list of official Zorin OS repos and "sudo add-apt-repository"ed about 3-4 of them into Ubuntu Server. After that, "sudo aptitude install zorin-os-desktop" ran without errors, and one reboot later, I was running Zorin OS 16.3 Core on an ARM Virtual Machine.
It's still not perfect. Strange oddities, glitches, and freezes occur here and there. For example, this is the second version of this post I'm writing. During the first draft, the VM froze, and I had to restart it. It just does that randomly, for seemingly no reason. I've added an app to the macOS host to see if it's the external SSD sleeping that's causing this issue, but I don't know, as of right now.
The Software Store (aka package manager) also doesn't seem to work properly. Nothing installs, and I always have to use "sudo aptitude install" to get stuff. I'm assuming, despite being the ARM64 version of Gnome Software, something under the hood is still attempting to install the AMD64 version of apps, causing the weird failures and indefinite stalls.
The main LibreOffice app, for some reason, also didn't appear in the Zorin Menu, and had to be added manually.
Only one of UTM's sound card drivers allowed the audio settings to appear as normal. Everything else eliminated a bunch of sliders in the "Sound" settings and muted the VM on startup. That was pretty annoying because I wanted to hear the Zorin OS login chime. Luckily, the one sound card option fixed all this, but for some reason, the VM occasionally starts up with zero audio. It always does this when I restart, so I always have to shut down and then turn back on to fix it.
I'm sure there's plenty more, but so far that's all I've found. I'm sure a more power user would find other stuff, but I'm really only looked to use Zorin OS as a productivity OS, so I'm not likely to run into much more.
To be fair, though, even with all the weird stuff, it still runs smoother than the native install on my 2011 MacBook Pro, so I'm not complaining. In fact, I'm just happy to be using Zorin OS on my desktop, at all.
