How to switch from Windows to Linux

Windows 10 stopped getting security fixes on 14 October 2025. If your PC can’t run Windows 11, Microsoft’s own page on the subject has two suggestions for you. Buy a new PC. Or pay to keep the fixes coming until 12 October 2027, when you’ll be standing in the same spot with a computer two years older.

There’s a third option. It’s free.

I’ve used Linux since 2004. It started with web servers. For most of the years since, Linux on the desktop had two big drawbacks, which were the interface and games. The interface grew up. Games were rescued by Steam and a tool inside it called Proton, which lets a large share of Windows games run on Linux after you flip one setting. My favourite game is Civilization, and it runs so well on Linux that I’d almost say it runs better. So lately I’ve been moving my own desktops across too. I began with Ubuntu. Fedora is what I use for development work, because I want the newest tools there. When somebody asks what they should install, I say Mint, for reasons that are further down this page.

What you’re getting into

Switching operating systems is moving house. Your belongings come with you: documents, photos, music, bookmarks. The furniture changes. Some of your apps make the trip, some get swapped for something similar, and one or two may have no replacement at all, which is better discovered before the truck is booked.

So, the bad news first. Adobe’s desktop apps don’t run on Linux. A few of the biggest online games refuse to, Fortnite and League of Legends among them, because their anti-cheat software blocks it. Printers mostly work and occasionally sulk. If your week depends on one of those, you want to know today, and the full list of what won’t work is short enough to read over a coffee.

Step 1. Check your apps

Write down the programs you’d miss if they vanished overnight. Ten is a long list for most people.

Then look each one up. Plenty run on Linux exactly as they are, including Chrome, Zoom, Spotify, Steam and VLC. Microsoft’s apps mostly survive as websites, so Office and Outlook keep working in a browser with the account you already have. The rest need a stand-in. Photoshop is the famous one, and each page tells you what happens to the files you’ve already made.

Step 2. Back up your files

Copy your files to an external drive. The backup guide has the full list, and the short one is Documents, Pictures, Desktop, Downloads, and your browser bookmarks if you don’t already sync them to an account.

Do this even if you plan to keep Windows. Installing an operating system is the one afternoon of the year when a single wrong click can wipe a disk, and with a copy sitting on a drive in the drawer, the worst case is a lost evening.

Step 3. Pick a Linux

Linux comes in versions called distributions, or distros for short. Think of trim levels on the same car. The engine and the apps are shared. You’re choosing a dashboard.

Install Linux Mint. Its desktop has a taskbar, a menu in the bottom-left corner and a clock in the bottom-right, which is where your hands will go looking for them. If you hate it in a month, you’ve lost an afternoon. Mint asks for 2 GB of memory and 20 GB of disk, where Windows 11 wants 4 GB and 64 GB plus a security chip your PC may have been born without.

There are two exceptions. A PC that exists mainly for games should get Bazzite, which arrives with Steam set up. A machine old enough to struggle with Mint will be happier on Lubuntu. The longer answer covers the other candidates. Everyone else can read the comparisons later, from the comfort of a working Mint desktop.

Step 4. Try it from a USB stick

This is the test drive, and it has a guide of its own. Linux can run entirely from a USB stick without touching Windows or a single one of your files.

1. Download Mint from its website. You get one large file ending in .iso. That’s a copy of an install disc, from the days when software came on discs.
2. Download Etcher, a small free program that Mint’s own guide recommends for Windows users. Point it at the .iso file, point it at an empty USB stick, and click Flash.
3. Restart the PC with the stick plugged in, and as it powers on, press the key that lets you choose what to start from. It’s Escape, Delete or one of the F keys depending on who made your computer, and it’s usually printed on the screen for about a second.
4. Choose the USB stick, and shortly afterwards you’re looking at a Mint desktop.

Now poke at it. Join your wifi, play a video with sound, print a page, close the lid and open it again. It’ll feel sluggish, since a USB stick is a slow place to run a computer from, and the installed version is much quicker. Nothing you do here is saved. When you’ve seen enough, shut down, pull the stick out, and Windows starts as if nothing happened.

If the wifi or the sound didn’t work, stop here and search for your laptop’s model plus “Linux Mint” before going any further.

Step 5. Install it

On that test desktop is an icon called Install Linux Mint. Double-click it. The short version is below, and the install guide goes screen by screen.

1. Pick your language and connect to the internet.
2. Tick the box offering multimedia codecs. Those are the small pieces that let videos and music play.
3. Choose where Mint goes. You can install it next to Windows, which gives you a menu at startup asking which one you want today. Or you can erase the disk and give Mint the whole thing.
4. Type a name and a password, then leave it alone while it copies everything across.

Keeping Windows costs you disk space and buys you a way back, and on a first install that’s a trade worth taking.

Step 6. Your first week

Apps come from Software Manager, which is an app store where nearly everything is free. Search, click Install, done. Most of the apps recommended on this site are in there.

Updates arrive through a small shield icon near the clock. It asks before it does anything, and that includes restarting your computer halfway through a sentence.

Sooner or later you’ll search for a fix and land on a forum post telling you to paste a line of text into a window called the terminal. Sometimes that really is the answer. Treat a command you don’t understand the way you’d treat an .exe file from a stranger, and look for a second source that agrees before you run it.

Step 1 takes about ten minutes, and you can do it from the Windows PC you’re reading this on: check your apps.