Going from windows to linux

How to Make the Switch From Windows to Linux

If you’re sick of Windows 10 or don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11, you can install Linux instead. Here’s how to make the switch to an open-source operating system and install apps.

Microsoft is getting closer to replacing Windows 10 with the sleeker Windows 11, but if you’re sick of embedded advertisements, constant updates, data collection, software lock-ins, and rising hardware requirements, we don’t blame you. The good news is you have options.

If you’ve been thinking about making the jump to a different operating system, now is the perfect time. But you aren’t stuck with the Windows-macOS binary, and don’t have to settle for the browser-based Chrome OS. Instead, you can turn to the world of Linux.

Choose Your Distribution

Unlike Windows and macOS, there isn’t just one version of Linux. Instead, Linux is packaged into many different distributions, or «distros,» each with their own interface and set of features. One may use a Mac-like interface with a dock and an «app store,» while others may use a more minimalist interface and require installing apps from the command line.

Exploring the bevy of Linux distributions out there is a fun part of the hobby, but for your first installation, you will likely want something popular and beginner-friendly, so it’s easy to get help when you need it. That’s why I recommend starting with Linux Mint.

There are a lot of distributions that aim to mimic Windows in layout and functionality, like Zorin OS, but they’re on the smaller side, and you won’t have as big a community to tap as you learn your way around. Ubuntu, on the other hand, is arguably the most popular distro on desktop PCs, but it isn’t very Windows-like at all these days.

Linux Mint is a perfect in-between option: it’s designed for beginners, offers a familiar desktop environment, and it’s based on Ubuntu, so you can make use of the enormous Ubuntu/Mint community when you need help.

You’re free to check out other distros instead, but I’ll be using Mint for the purposes of this guide, and I recommend you do too. It’s not my personal distro of choice, but it’s great for new Windows migrants, and it’s easier to explore other distros once you’ve nailed down the basics on a beginner-friendly system.

Create Your Installation Drive

Head to Mint’s download page and choose the 64-bit «Cinnamon» version. Cinnamon is the desktop environment I recommend for former Windows users, though MATE is also pretty Windows-like, even though it’s a bit less modern. XFCE is ideal for old or low-powered PCs, thanks to its light resource usage. Mint’s download page provides a number of links depending on where you live. If you use BitTorrent, I recommend grabbing the torrent file, which will download much faster.

The installer will come as an ISO, or disc image file. To install it on your system, you’ll need to burn the file to a DVD or USB flash drive. We’re going to do the latter using a tool called Rufus. Install Rufus, open it up, and insert a flash drive that’s 2GB or larger. (If you have a fast USB 3.0 or 3.1 drive, all the better.) You should see it appear in the Device drop-down at the top of Rufus’ main window.

Next, click the Select button next to Disk or ISO image, and choose the Linux Mint ISO you just downloaded. Press the Start button, and if prompted to download new versions of Syslinux, click Yes. Note that this will erase your flash drive, so make sure there isn’t anything important on there before continuing. When it’s finished, you’ll see a success message and your flash drive will be named LINUX MINT.

Now it’s time to back up your data and reboot your computer. Buckle your seat belts because it’s time to install Linux.

Install Linux on Your PC

As your computer reboots, you should see a message telling you to press a certain key to access the Boot Menu (usually something like F12). If not, you’ll see a key to enter Setup (often Delete). Press one of those keys, and look for the option to boot from the inserted USB drive. (If you enter the full setup menu, it’ll be in a Boot settings menu somewhere, and you’ll have to exit the menu to reboot again when you’re done.)

You will then be greeted by GRUB, Linux Mint’s boot menu, where you can choose to boot into Linux Mint. If you run into any errors, you may need to Google around for a fix. I had to enable the nomodeset option for my graphics card, for example. Others may have to tweak or disable Secure Boot in the BIOS.

This installer is what we call a Live CD, where you can actually poke around and use the Linux Mint desktop before installing it. This will give you a chance to see if this particular distro appeals to you without it actually touching your system drive. Once you’re satisfied, double-click the Install Linux Mint icon and go through the wizard.

Be sure to check the box next to Install third-party software, since it contains useful drivers and codecs you almost certainly want. From here, you can wipe your hard drive entirely, erasing all traces of Windows and using Linux as your only operating system. (Make double sure you’ve backed up your data before doing this.)

Alternatively, you can divide your drive up into two partitions and dual boot Linux alongside Windows. This will allow you to reboot into one or the other whenever you want. If nothing else, it’s comforting to know you have that safety net during the transition before you remove Windows entirely.

Choose the relevant option from the Installation Type menu, and click Install Now. The process may take a little while, but when it’s done, you’ll get a success message. Click the Restart Now button to boot into Linux Mint and start getting acquainted with your new OS.

Get Acquainted With Linux and Install Some Apps

When you reboot, you’ll be dropped into the Linux Mint desktop once again—only this time, it’s installed on your PC. The basics are pretty familiar: click the button in the lower-left corner to see applications, manage windows from the bottom taskbar, and so on. There are, however, a few things in Linux that work differently than in Windows, with apps being the biggest.

In Linux, it’s less common to download apps from the web. Instead, each distro has its own repository—kind of like a free app store, with a directory of popular apps. You can install an app from the repositories in one of two ways: from a graphical software manager (again, which looks like an app store) or from the command line.

To open Linux Mint’s Software Manager, click the menu button in the lower-left corner and head to Administration > Software Manager (or just start typing «software manager,» like you would in Windows). From here, you can download plenty of free, open-source apps.

Some are Linux versions of their Windows counterparts, like Steam and Spotify, while others are open-source alternatives to common apps (Banshee is a music player similar to iTunes, Gimp is an image editor akin to Photoshop). You can browse here or search for apps using the bar at the top.

How to Install and Uninstall Apps

If you know what you’re looking for, it’s generally faster to install apps from the command line. And while it may seem intimidating at first, Linux relies on the command line for various tasks, so it might behoove you to get comfortable with it. To install an app—let’s say the open-source media player VLC—open a Terminal window and run:

Sudo apt update

sudo apt install vlc

Let’s break that down: «sudo» tells the system to run the command as root (or, as it might be called in Windows, as an administrator), «apt» is the name of Linux Mint’s package manager, and «update» ensures the list of available apps is up to date.

The second command, which includes «install vlc,» is self-explanatory. You should run «sudo apt update» before installing any app, and you can replace «vlc» with the name of any app you want to install. If you aren’t sure what the repository calls it, you can run:

sudo apt cache search vlc

To uninstall an app, just run:

sudo apt remove vlc

This will remove the app, but not your configuration files, so if you decide to reinstall it later, your settings will still be there.

If you want to remove configuration files too, you can instead run:

sudo apt purge vlc

How to Update Apps

You’ll also want to periodically update those apps, so you have the latest versions. You can do this, again, in two ways: from the graphical tool or from the command line.

For the graphical tool, click the shield icon in the lower-right corner to open the Update Manager app. You can then click the Install Updates button to update all your software.

Alternatively, you can open a Terminal and run two commands:

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

Again, the «update» command checks for new versions of your software, and the «upgrade» command actually upgrades all your apps. You’ll want to run these two together, just like you do for installing new apps.

Those are the most crucial things to know right now, but take some time to browse around Mint’s interface and its settings to see what it has to offer. The Welcome window that appears at startup can be a big help—its First Steps area will show you how to choose different desktop layouts, install multimedia codecs you might want, and install necessary drivers for your hardware.

You’ll get the hang of the basics pretty quickly, but the Mint and Ubuntu forums are always there to help if you get stuck. Just be sure to search around, since there’s a good chance someone before you has had the same question.

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Moving from Windows to Linux? Here’s how to take the good stuff with you

Bring your apps, docs, user settings and preferences along when you jump to Linux.

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Senior Writer, Computerworld |

So you’re switching from Windows to Linux? Great. Like other users and organizations who’ve taken the plunge, it’s likely you’re making the move to take advantage of Linux’s stability and reliance on open standards. Now all you have to do is prepare carefully for your move.

In this case, careful prep means not just installing Linux on your system — either on your existing computer or a whole new machine — but also transferring your documents, bookmarks, preferences and system settings, and in some cases finding equivalent open-source applications for the Windows applications you were using before.

It’s not too difficult to find info on how to actually install Linux, but what about the process of migration, of moving what you’ve been doing on Windows over to Linux and doing the same thing there? Here, we give you the lowdown on the essentials of making a full-blown Windows-to-Linux migration. We tell you what you need to be prepared to do, how to move things over, and what applications to consider as replacements for many common Windows apps.

We won’t cover the Linux installation process itself here, which varies widely between distributions. If you don’t already have some knowledge of the installation process, put this article aside and get familiar with that process first. Even though installing Linux is a lot easier now than it’s ever been, it’s hugely useful to be as familiar as you can with the setup process. That way you can best plan how to migrate your data and user settings and not be caught off guard.

Migrating from Windows to Linux

Three Roads to Data Migration

There are three basic approaches you can take in migrating your user settings and data from Windows to Linux:

• Let Ubuntu Linux do it for you. Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions out there and, as of right now, the only major distribution that has migration tools built in as part of its setup process.
• Use a third-party application.
• Do it yourself.

The last option obviously requires the most expertise of the three, but it also gives you the most flexibility, since you’re essentially writing (and punching) your own ticket.

Speaking of maximum flexibility, the work described here is a lot easier if you are migrating to an entirely new PC that has a Linux installation, rather than changing operating systems on an existing PC. With a new machine, you can leave everything exactly as it is on the old system more or less indefinitely. If you must run Linux on the same machine that currently runs your Windows, it’s doubly imperative that you back up all your data before you migrate.

Which brings us to Topic A: backup.

But First, Back Up

Whatever approach you take, the very first thing you should do before attempting a migration is make a full backup of any data that you can’t replace. If you choose to migrate documents into new formats, keep the unchanged originals — if a particular document can’t be converted correctly now, you’ll always have the original to refer back to.

Make your backup in a format that is as platform-neutral as possible, and make it to a device that can be read by either platform. That way, if you later have to restore something on either Windows or Linux, you won’t run into any unexpected hassles.

The simplest way to do this is to just copy the files as is to another disk that can be mounted in Linux. Most Linux distributions can now read the FAT32 or NTFS disk formats natively, so you could copy your files to an external hard drive formatted in Windows with either of those file systems, which will then allow you to read the data back easily in Linux. I recommend using NTFS as your target partition type if you’re copying from NTFS to begin with, since FAT32 can’t support individual files larger than 4GB.

One way to do this is to make a .tgz or .zip archive of the original data to be saved, which you can accomplish with most common archiving utilities. On Windows, 7-Zip has been my favorite choice for a while because it’s both free and open source. If you choose to use it as well, use the .zip or .gzip/.tar file formats with the program, not its own proprietary .7z compression format. A Linux version of the program, p7zip, also exists, but since every Linux distribution out there has some way to extract .zip and .gzip archives, those formats are the way to go.

Incidentally, the more stuff you have to move from one platform to the next, the more you may want to reconsider how you store things to begin with. If you’re taking the time to migrate to a whole new operating system, maybe now is a good to rethink how you structure your storage. Hard disks have become cheap enough that keeping data entirely segregated on a second drive is no longer an unprecedented concept, and it may save you a lot of work in the long run. (In my own case, I have my personal documents on a second hard drive, separate from the OS installation, and a third drive devoted entirely to my music library.)

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