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

There are more than a billion PCs in use and, according to StatCounter, only 71 percent of them run Windows. Among the rest, about 4 percent run Linux. That's tens of millions of people with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, etc as their desktop operating system. I envy them.

Windows 11 has become more annoying lately as it shoves ads for XBox Game Pass in my face, pushes AI features no one asked for and demands that I reconsider the choices I made during installation on a regular basis. Plus, it just isn't that attractive.

I'm ready to try joining that industrious four percent and installing Linux on my computers to use as my main OS, at least for a week. I'll blog about the experience here.

It's hard to give up Windows forever because so many applications only run in Microsoft's OS. For example, the peripheral software that runs with many keyboards and mice isn't available for Linux. Lots of games will not run under Linux. So I think it's likely I'll be using Windows again, at least some of the time, after this week is through.

However, for now, I'm going to give Linux a very serious audition and document the experience.

Which Linux should I install?

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.