I decided to install Ubuntu on my old Windows 10 PC yesterday. My new HP Mini PC has been working fine for a while, and I don’t think I need to keep the old one around “just in case” anymore.
I have a long history of messing around with various Linux distros, but never really sticking with Linux as my main OS, or ever really doing any meaningful work on it. (My Linux tag on this blog has entries back to 2002, and I’ve been using Linux since the 90s, when I first installed Manchester Linux from two floppy disks.)
I’m honestly not sure if I’m going to keep the old machine. It used to be that I could find someone to give my old PCs away to pretty easily, but that’s really not the case anymore. Part of that is maybe not having as many friends and family as I used to, and part of that is PCs being (relatively) cheap and ubiquitous these days. This PC is still “good”, from my perspective, and there’s plenty that could be done with it. But it’s a big tower PC and getting rid of it would allow me to simplify things on my desk a bit, and clean up some of my tangled cables.
Maybe when I’m retired, I’ll become a “tech fairy” like this guy. For now, I guess I’ll just keep the old PC where it is, and boot it up once in a while to play with Linux.
I might as well talk a little bit about the current setup process for Ubuntu and how it compares to my previous experience with Linux distros. First, I should say that it wasn’t hard at all, and I really didn’t hit a single snag. In the past, there’d usually be some issue or another with video drivers or something, but it was all very smooth. I guess that’s the result of years of work smoothing things out with these installers, and maybe also because there’s been some natural convergence over the years, where there are fewer outliers and weird edge cases.
The specific version I installed was Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS. I’m definitely not at a point where I need the “latest and greatest.” I’m better off with the stable version.
The process was pretty smooth. I first downloaded a 6 GB ISO file, which took some time. Then I used Etcher, their recommended tool, to create a bootable USB stick. Then I booted from the stick and followed the prompts. The actual install process took less than 30 minutes.
Today’s Ubuntu desktop doesn’t look terribly different from how I remember it looking the last time I used Ubuntu on a desktop, which was probably 2015. (How time flies!) In terms of the tools that you get out of the box, with the relatively minimal install that I did, it’s mostly just Firefox and a few other random things. Firefox was enough for me to bootstrap the basic stuff that I really need.
I found that the 1Password Firefox extension works in Linux, so that was good. There seems to even be a 1Password desktop app for Linux, but I didn’t get around to trying that.
There’s no Evernote client for Linux. (Or at least not an official one.) There are a couple of unofficial clients, but I didn’t try those. The web client for Evernote works reasonably well in Firefox, so that’s good enough.
The next thing I tried was Visual Studio Code. That was downloadable from the Ubuntu “App Center.” The install was simple and easy. I didn’t really get very far with VS Code though; I just checked it out to make sure it worked.
If I was serious about doing anything meaningful with Ubuntu, I’d have to do a lot more work figuring things out, but it’s nice to know that I’ve made a start with it, and I could go further if I wanted to.