Ubuntu
The best known Linux, and the one most instructions are written for.
- Feels like Windows
- Beginner friendly
- Ready for gaming
- Good on an old PC
Our verdict
Ubuntu is the safe institutional choice rather than the friendliest one. Version 26.04 LTS is the current long term release, with five years of free security and maintenance updates and an option to extend that further at no cost for personal use on a few machines.
The desktop is GNOME, which is tidy and calm but not shaped like Windows. There is no menu button in the corner. You press the Super key, type the first letters of what you want and press Enter. Most people take a week to stop resenting that and then stop noticing it.
Canonical publishes a minimum of a 2 GHz dual core processor, 6 GB of memory and 25 GB of free disk space, which is the highest minimum in this list. On an older laptop, pick Linux Mint, Lubuntu or MX Linux instead. If you want Ubuntu underneath with a Windows shaped desktop on top, Kubuntu is the same system with KDE Plasma.
Best for: People who want the most common answer, Newer laptops, Anyone who needs vendor support.
What's good
- When a company supports Linux at all, it usually supports this one
- Five years of free updates, extendable to ten with a free personal account
- Almost every guide and forum answer online assumes Ubuntu
- Wide hardware support, including many laptops sold with it preinstalled
What to know first
- The GNOME desktop puts a dock on the left and hides the app menu, which takes adjusting to
- Canonical pushes its own Snap app format, and some people dislike that
- The published minimum of 6 GB of memory rules out older machines
The details
- Memory (RAM) needed
- 6 GB minimum, 8 GB comfortable
- Disk space needed
- 25 GB
- Desktop look
- GNOME
- Updates
- A new version every so often, stable in between
- Supported for
- 5 years per version
- Built on
- Independent
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