zorin is more out of box and mint is lighter. so when you install zorin its going to put in libre office, disk burning, windows rpd, wine with play on linux, its a long list. So it comes down to out of box (I want a bunch of software I may use to be installed along with the os) or lighter and get what you want later. zorin is basically a lazier distro which is why I like it :) while some stuff may be a waste of space I just want it available right away or in a situation where im offline and did not think to install it previously for some reason (disk burning is a good example for this kind of thing)