My week with Linux: I'm dumping Windows for Ubuntu to see how it goes

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2025-05-06T17:48:44.049Z

The first thing I had to install

The very first thing I had to do under Ubuntu was connect my Bluetooth mouse, a Logitech MX Master 3, using the Bluetooth settings menu. To get there, I just opened the Ubuntu menu and searched for Bluetooth.

search for Bluetooth — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

I then put my MX Master 3 in pairing mode and it was detected. I just clicked connect and it immediately paired.

MX Master 3 mouse paired — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

2025-05-06T17:34:24.915Z

Ubuntu 25.04 is now installed

Ubuntu 25.04 welcome — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

So, after the decryption finished, I was able to install Ubuntu 25.04 and I'm just getting started with it now. Here's how it went.

First, I booted off my USB Flash drive and was presented with this GRUB menu.

I chose "Try or install Ubuntu." Next I waited a few seconds for it to boot into the live environment.

Booting into Ubuntu — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Then I was presented with a dialog box that stepped me through some choices. The first choice was language.

Ubuntu language — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Then I got a list of accessibility options that I skipped over because I didn't need them.

Ubuntu accessibility — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

After that, it was keyboard layout.

Ubuntu keyboard layout — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Then I was prompted to choose a connection. Since my laptop is currently connected to a Thunderbolt 3 dock that is connected to Ethernet, I went with "Use wired connection."

Ubuntu choose connection — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Then I was asked whether I wanted to install or try Ubuntu. I chose "Install." But If I had chosen "Try," I would have been able to run Ubuntu off of the Flash drive. Still, I want to use Ubuntu like this for a prolonged period so I'm past the point of just trying it for a few minutes.

I was asked whether I wanted an Interactive Installation or an Automated installation. I'm going with Interactive so I can make all my own choices.

Interactive or automated installation of Ubuntu — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

I chose to Install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware and to download and install support for additional media formats. I'm not sure if these choices actually did anything or not.

install third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi on Ubuntu — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

I was then asked whether I wanted to install Ubuntu alongside Windows Boot Manager or to erase the disk. Since BitLocker was now disabled, I was able to choose and did choose to install Ubuntu alongside Windows.

I then decided to alot about 500GB (545GB to be precise) to my Ubuntu installation. I have a 2TB SSD in my laptop so this ends up using up a quarter of my space. If I only end up installing a few things, I may regret going with 500GB over a smaller amount like 256GB, but I want a decent amount of room to play with.

allot space to Ubuntu — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

To avoid the kind of hassle I had when disabling BitLocker, I opted to go without encryption.

choose encryption or no encryption on ubuntu — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

I entered a name for my computer and chose a username and password.

choose username and password — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

I then chose my timezone.

Ubuntu timezone — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Then I clicked Install.

I had to wait a few minutes, about five minutes or so, for Ubuntu to copy its files and finish installing. During the install, I got a promotion for Spotify.

Ubuntu spotify promotion — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Finally, I got a message that Ubuntu 25.04 is installed and ready to use.

Ubuntu 25.04 installed and ready to use — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

I restarted and was first shown the GRUB menu which allows me to choose between booting to Ubuntu and booting to Windows. I didn't touch the computer for a few seconds and it automatically booted to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu grub — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Then I was welcomed to Ubuntu 25.04. The adventure begins!

Ubuntu welcome — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

2025-05-06T15:26:11.227Z

Calling Rufus, the ultimate USB boot disk maker

After downloading the ISO file, the next step is to "burn" (aka write) it to a bootable USB Flash Drive. To do this writing process, I need a popular free program called Rufus that does the burning.

I'm using an SK hynix Tube drive, which is the form factor of a USB stick, but is technically a USB SSD. So in Rufus, I have to select "List USB Hard Drives" for it to appear as a valid option. Then I have to select a GPT partition scheme, choose the Ubuntu ISO and click Start.

This is a very fast USB SSD so the process only takes a few minutes. Then I'll be booting off of the Flash drive, which will take me to a GRUB menu where I can choose to install the OS.

BitLocker encryption blocks my dual boot

Bitlocker message — (Image credit: Future)

So I was in the middle of installing Ubuntu and going through the menus with the intention of setting up a dual boot configuration on my laptop and this happened. It turns out that having BitLocker encryption enabled, which it is by default on most Windows 11 systems these days, is a problem for the Ubuntu installer.

I could try manual installation and see if that works, but I'd rather do this the easy way. So I'm going into Windows and, for now, disabling BitLocker.

To turn off BitLocker, I went into Control Panel -> BItLocker Drive Encryption and clicked Turn Off BitLocker. Let's see if this does the trick.

Waiting on decryption

decryption percentage — (Image credit: Future)

So I just learned something. If you disable BitLocker encryption, you have to wait a fair amount of time for Windows to decrypt your drive completely. Though you can shutdown or reboot during the decryption process, what you cannot do is install Linux to dual boot until the drive is completely decrypted.

I read that decryption could take hours, but my process appears to be buzzing along and will be done in a few minutes, I think. Windows 11 wasn't showing me a percentage, but the way to see how much is left to decrypt is to go into PowerShell and type manage-bde -status C: . That will show the percentage of your drive that's still encrypted and you can keep checking until it gets to 0.

2025-05-06T15:09:38.864Z

Downloading Ubuntu 25.04

So my first step is to download Ubuntu 25.04 which is available as an ISO from Ubuntu's website. The ISO file is 5.8GB, but fortunately it downloaded in about a minute here on the office network.

2025-05-06T13:46:29.325Z

Which Linux should I install?

Ubuntu 25.04 — (Image credit: Shutterstock (539485015))

If you look around the Internet, you'll see that there are a ton of Linux distros to choose from. Our own Les Pounder recently listed his favorite six Linux flavors for reviving an old PC. There, he talked about Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi Desktop, Fedora, MX Linux, Linux Mint and Manjaro. Let's not forget Fedora, Debian, AlmaLinux, Kali Linux or Pop!_OS.

So which one should I go with? Some folks recommend Linux Mint, because its Cinnamon desktop is supposed to be more Windows like than those in other flavors. Others say Manjaro is a great choice for power users.

I'm going to go with Ubuntu, specifically Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin," which just came out a few weeks ago. This is the latest version of the most popular and best-supported Linux distro. However, it only gets 9 months of support.

Granted, I could use Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, which will maintain support for five years and is therefore the most stable version of the OS available right now. However, I want to try the latest and greatest version so I'm going to download 25.04.

After I download the ISO file for it, I'm going to follow Les's instructions for how to dual boot Linux with Windows. So I'm going to install it on both my laptop, a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (12th gen) which I use at the office, and my desktop, a custom-built PC with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X CPU inside. It should run well on both.

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27 Comments Comment from the forums

ex_bubblehead

In my opinion KUbuntu would be a more windowslike experience. The KDE desktop was designed to hide much less of the details from the user, unlike Gnome and others. However this is coming from a longtime KDE user (back to 1.0)
Reply
COLGeek

Any of the modern, full featured distros will do the trick. Mint is an easy choice, as are the Ubuntu variants.

I would recommend against a lesser supported/well known distro, in case you get more adventurous, until you get more familiar with the new OS.

Aside from games and specific apps, I would be surprised if you see any real difference in actual usage between Windows and Linux. Things just work.
Reply
bit_user

ex_bubblehead said:
In my opinion KUbuntu would be a more windowslike experience. The KDE desktop was designed to hide much less of the details from the user, unlike Gnome and others.
100% agree. I also stayed with KDE, once I'd tried it, largely due to the amount of configurability. Before that, FVWM2 was my preferred window manager.

My understanding of Kubuntu is that it's basically just regular desktop Ubuntu, but with the default desktop environment and apps set to the KDE ones. Other than that, it's using all the same repos as regular Ubuntu and therefore has no real downsides (if KDE is what you want). Even when using regular Ubuntu, you can still install a KDE window manager + apps, but you have to explicitly do so.

ex_bubblehead said:
However this is coming from a longtime KDE user (back to 1.0)
I forget what version I jumped onto, but it's been about 20 years, for me.
Reply
erazog

Coming from Windows I'd suggest Kubuntu (KDE desktop) or Cinnamon Ubuntu (UI from Mint), both of those give a familiar experience though no Linux UI actually matches Windows to even 90% of the way and I've tried all of the Linux GUI's and some very obscure distros.

LXQT (WinXP) Cinnamon (Win 7/10) and KDE (Win10/11) are the closest to Windows at least depending on which version Win UI you like the most.

The one very confusing thing about Linux that its basically a command line/text based OS and not a GUI platform like Windows or MacOS which define how software is graphically installed or how you troubleshoot a problem with the system, this is a major downside vs windows. if something goes wrong the difficulty curve ramps up and your expected to know very complicated CLI commands.

I would much rather there be a Gnome Linux or KDE Linux platform that defines the system from top to bottom graphically but sadly its not like that and some in the Linux scene want it to stay "swappable".

Also the package manager (think app store) is its own library so one distro wont have the same software library as another, the app install system for Ubuntu is called Snap and does define how software is installed graphically on ubuntu systems. But Snaps are rarely ever seen in the wild outside the ubuntu software centre.

A competitor to Snap is Flatpaks via Flathub, this can be enabled in Ubuntu and I recommend doing it but you might get duplicate listings in your Ubuntu software centre as some of the same stuff is across both but Flathub has one big difference in that it forbids CLI apps so everything on that must have a GUI which is much more comfortable to windows users (also SteamOS uses Flathub for its desktop).

There are also appimages which are kind of like standalone windows exe's that you will find on some software sites.
Reply
bit_user

COLGeek said:
Aside from games and specific apps, I would be surprised if you see any real difference in actual usage between Windows and Linux. Things just work.
There are a few things about Linux that could surprise Windows users.

For instance, I find Linux to be less paternalistic about things like deleting a file while you still have it open. Windows tends not to let you do such things. With Linux, the way it uses reference-counting avoids the seeming paradox of such an action, because what you're actually doing is deleting the directory metadata associated with the file, but the file data is still there until the last reference to it goes away.
Reply
bit_user

erazog said:
Also the package manager (think app store) is its own library so one distro wont have the same software library as another, the app install system for Ubuntu is called Snap and does define how software is installed graphically on ubuntu systems. But Snaps are rarely ever seen in the wild outside the ubuntu software centre.
Yeah, but some packages are available as either a regular OS package (.deb file, on Debian-derived distros, like Ubuntu) or a snap. So, you sometimes have a choice, even within a distro.

I guess, for a beginner, it's probably safe to stick with snaps for everything. Installing native OS packages should have some benefits for performance and memory, though. There are security benefits, as well, since any vulnerabilities only need to be fixed in the OS for all other OS-level apps to benefit. With snaps, each would need to get rebuilt with the updated library and someone using them would have to download and install the patched versions.

Snaps are more like the Windows way of doing things, where apps tend to have their own private copies of all the .DLLs they need. If one of those .DLLs has a bug, you have to get a patch for it from the app developer.
Reply
HAZERD2

I'm using Xubuntu 24.04 at the moment. I think you should try that aswell
It's just installing the xubuntu desktop into normal Ubuntu and then selecting the Xfce session
Reply
stuff and nonesense

I’ve been using Kubuntu on my second PC for a while now, the only annoyances I’ve found..
1, installing non repository programs: it’s a pain, decompress the tar ball, find the install script, run it.
Solution, package the thing so all you do is click on the delivery file, oops, that’s too like windows, that said there must be a way, a method to simplify the installation (I gave up trying to install the latest GIMP version at release, it wasn’t available in the repository and refused to install.. I have patience I can wait).

2, I introduced a hard drive, it displaced a drive from its mount breaking a share to my windows pc. The solution was to edit a file to force the existing and new drives to specific mount points. Not difficult but finding the information was an hour wasted.

An aside, games under Wine:
I ran Guild Wars 2 under Wine, I was seeing upto 80fps, running the Steam install and using Proton as the translation layer I saw 160+ fps and ran close to native Windows averages.
Reply
bit_user

stuff and nonesense said:
1, installing non repository programs: it’s a pain, decompress the tar ball, find the install script, run it.
Some of the more popular software maintains their own repository. You just add that and then you can install their packages & updates the same way as packages directly from the distro. And when they don't do that, popular apps tend to provide an app image that you can just download and run.

I can't remember the last time I've had to build a regular app from the sources, but then my needs are a lot more basic than some.

stuff and nonesense said:
there must be a way, a method to simplify the installation (I gave up trying to install the latest GIMP version at release, it wasn’t available in the repository and refused to install.. I have patience I can wait).
I'd look for a snap or an app image of it.

Edit: you might want to look here:
https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2025/03/gimp-3-0-is-out-install-ubuntu/
Full disclosure: I haven't installed it, so I can't personally endorse any of these instructions.
Reply
das_stig

erazog said:
Coming from Windows I'd suggest Kubuntu (KDE desktop) or Cinnamon Ubuntu (UI from Mint), both of those give a familiar experience though no Linux UI actually matches Windows to even 90% of the way and I've tried all of the Linux GUI's and some very obscure distros.

LXQT (WinXP) Cinnamon (Win 7/10) and KDE (Win10/11) are the closest to Windows at least depending on which version Win UI you like the most.

The one very confusing thing about Linux that its basically a command line/text based OS and not a GUI platform like Windows or MacOS which define how software is graphically installed or how you troubleshoot a problem with the system, this is a major downside vs windows. if something goes wrong the difficulty curve ramps up and your expected to know very complicated CLI commands.

I would much rather there be a Gnome Linux or KDE Linux platform that defines the system from top to bottom graphically but sadly its not like that and some in the Linux scene want it to stay "swappable".

Also the package manager (think app store) is its own library so one distro wont have the same software library as another, the app install system for Ubuntu is called Snap and does define how software is installed graphically on ubuntu systems. But Snaps are rarely ever seen in the wild outside the ubuntu software centre.

A competitor to Snap is Flatpaks via Flathub, this can be enabled in Ubuntu and I recommend doing it but you might get duplicate listings in your Ubuntu software centre as some of the same stuff is across both but Flathub has one big difference in that it forbids CLI apps so everything on that must have a GUI which is much more comfortable to windows users (also SteamOS uses Flathub for its desktop).

There are also appimages which are kind of like standalone windows exe's that you will find on some software sites.
I agree, a distro that focuses on one desktop, one package format etc and has a look and feel to Windows, can support a lot of WinApps out of the box without the user getting hands dirty with CLI, will win many over.

Example is Windows 11 itself, Windows 10 was a mismash of various WinX gui's that just didn't feel right, Microsoft has take it's time to migrate them to a common look and feel, that even stuff like network configuring can be done without a CLI.

If only these smaller and unique Linux projects just get together to pool knowledge and create a defacto distro for the masses, the year of Linux could be a reality !
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