Moving from Windows to Linux at Home
There is a perfectly good computer in a lot of houses right now that Microsoft stopped supporting last year. Linux will run on it happily, and you can find out whether you like it in about twenty minutes without changing a single thing on the hard drive. That last part is the whole trick, and it is the part nobody tells you.
Whether this is even your problem
Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025. Plenty of the machines running it are fine — quick enough, nothing wrong with them — but they fail the hardware check for Windows 11 over the security chip, and no amount of goodwill gets them past it. That is the situation Linux actually solves. A machine that felt slow under Windows often feels quick again, because a lightweight desktop asks far less of it.
What Linux does not solve is a workflow built on software that only exists for Windows. I will be specific about that further down, because the honest answer for some people is do not do this, and it is better to find that out from an article than three days after wiping the drive.
Try it first, and risk nothing
Nearly every Linux distribution ships as a live image: you write it to a USB stick, boot the computer from the stick, and the whole operating system runs from memory. The hard drive is not touched. Nothing is installed. When you shut down, the machine is exactly as it was.
This is the single most useful thing to know, and it turns the decision from a leap into an errand:
-
Download the image. Get it from the distribution's own site. The
file is a few gigabytes and ends in
.iso. - Write it to a USB stick. On Windows, Rufus or balenaEtcher will do it in a couple of clicks. An 8 GB stick is plenty, and it gets erased, so use one you do not care about.
- Boot from it. Restart and press the boot-menu key as it comes up — usually F12, sometimes F9, Esc or F10 depending on the maker. Pick the USB stick. Choose the option that says Try rather than Install.
- Then actually test it. Not the desktop wallpaper — the things that ruin a switch: Wi-Fi, sound, the trackpad and its scrolling, an external monitor, the webcam, and your printer. Open the browser and sign in to something. Running from a USB stick is slow; judge the hardware, not the speed.
If something important does not work on the live stick, it will not magically work after installing. That is the point of the exercise.
Which one to put on the stick
For somebody coming from Windows the usual answer is Linux Mint, and the usual answer is right. Its Cinnamon desktop has a menu in the bottom-left, a task bar, a system tray and a notification area, which means your hands already know where things are. The current release is 22.3, called Zena, out in January 2026 and supported until April 2029 — so a machine set up now is not due for another decision for years.
Ubuntu is the other sensible choice, mostly because it is the one every tutorial and forum answer assumes; when you search an error message, the result you find will usually be written for Ubuntu, and Mint is close enough that most of it still applies. Zorin OS goes further than either at looking like Windows, if that matters to you.
Do not spend a fortnight comparing distributions. For a home machine the differences are smaller than the forums suggest, and the desktop you are looking at matters more than the system underneath it. Put Mint on a stick and go.
What genuinely will not work
This is the section that decides it, so here it is plainly.
Microsoft Office has no desktop version for Linux and Microsoft has announced no plans for one. Their supported route is the browser version at office.com, which is capable and is probably fine for letters, budgets and homework. It is not fine if you live in heavy Excel — VBA macros, Power Query, Access databases are where this falls down and no amount of fiddling fixes it. LibreOffice ships with Mint and installs in a click on practically any distribution — it is in every standard software repository, so there is nothing to hunt down. OnlyOffice is the closer match if you want something that feels like Office.
Adobe's applications — Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom — have no native Linux version, and there is no sign of one coming. GIMP and Krita cover a lot of image work, Darktable handles raw photos, and DaVinci Resolve has a real Linux build for video. Whether those are replacements or merely alternatives depends entirely on what you do for a living.
Worth watching rather than switching to: ArtCraft is building a whole suite of these — image editing, vector work, video, raw photos, page layout, even a spreadsheet — as free, open-source applications written in Rust, with native installers for Linux rather than a browser wrapped in a window. It is moving quickly. It is also early: at the time of writing three of the thirteen are in alpha and the rest are still being built, so treat it as something to check back on in a year, not as the reason you cancel a subscription.
Games are better than their reputation, with one hard exception. Install Steam, turn on Proton, and the great majority of the catalog simply runs. The exception is competitive multiplayer with kernel-level anti-cheat, where it is up to each publisher to switch Linux support on and many have not. EA's own anti-cheat does not support Linux at all, which takes Battlefield and EA SPORTS FC off the table, and the makers of Rust have said they have no plans to enable it. If a particular game is the reason you own the computer, check that game before you do anything else.
The pattern across all three: everyday work moves over easily, and professional tools with no Linux build do not move at all.
Keeping Windows as well
You do not have to choose. If the machine has two drives, put Linux on the second one and leave Windows alone — that is the arrangement least likely to go wrong, because nothing has to be resized and either system can be removed later without disturbing the other.
Sharing one drive between the two also works, and the installer will offer to do it, but it means shrinking the Windows partition, and that is where the horror stories come from. If you go that way, back up first — properly, to an external drive, and check that you can actually open a file from the backup. A backup you have not tested is a hope, not a backup.
The first week
- Install software from the Software Manager, not by downloading files from websites. It is the same idea as an app store, the packages are checked, and they update along with everything else. The habit of hunting for installers is the one Windows reflex worth unlearning early.
- Run the updater when it asks. Updates are quick, they do not reboot the machine out from under you, and they cover every application on the system rather than just the operating system.
- When something breaks, search the exact error. Include your distribution's name. The answer usually exists and is usually four years old and still correct.
- Give it a fortnight before judging. The first few days are spent looking for things that have moved. That is not the system being difficult; that is any new system.
A fair summary
If you browse, write, email, watch things, do the household accounts and play games that are not competitive shooters, a Linux desktop in 2026 will do all of it on hardware Microsoft has written off, and will keep doing it for years. If your week depends on Photoshop or on an Excel workbook somebody built macros into, it will not, and no article should talk you into pretending otherwise.
The good news is that you do not have to take anybody's word for which of those you are. That is what the USB stick is for. Twenty minutes, nothing installed, and you will know.