Ubuntu, first released by Canonical in 2004 and founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, takes its name from the Zulu and Xhosa idea of “ubuntu” — a philosophy often understood as humanity toward others, or “I am because we are.”
Why I switched
At some point, I just couldn’t tolerate my Windows development setup anymore.
I had put up with it for a long time, but too many tools I needed simply weren’t practical to use there. Anything that depended on Docker deployment was a problem, including Docker itself. From 2016 to 2022, I had been working on a MacBook Pro, but eventually the hardware felt too weak, so I sold it and moved to a desktop running Windows 10. That setup lasted until now.
Recently, though, I started working with some open-source applications related to LLMs, and a lot of them expect a Linux environment. That more or less forced the move to Ubuntu.
There was also a more basic reason: Windows takes up far too much disk space. Sometimes the system footprint would go past 100 GB. My current machine uses dual Xeon CPUs with 64 GB of memory, so if I want to get as much as possible out of the hardware, installing Ubuntu feels like the better choice anyway.
The installation process
The actual installation was straightforward:
- Back up important files carefully. This part really matters. Most of my work was already backed up on GitHub, so the risk was relatively low. Even so, I still managed to lose one version of a project.
- Download the latest stable desktop ISO for
Ubuntu. - Download Rufus to create a bootable USB drive. Making the installer is very simple: choose the ISO file, start the process, and wait for it to finish.
- Reboot, set the machine to boot from the USB drive, and follow the installation prompts.
- After that, it’s mainly a matter of entering the system and setting up the environment you need.
Living with Ubuntu
The last time I seriously considered switching to Ubuntu was a few years ago. Back then I was still playing games, and the gaming environment was the main reason I didn’t change systems.
This time I finally committed to it. Part of that was because of programming study projects, but another part was simply that gaming no longer matters that much to me. And if I really want to play something once in a while, I’ve already found a possible way to run it — I’ll test that later.
A few practical notes after installation:
- Graphics drivers may need to be installed manually after the system setup is complete:
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall, then verify with:nvidia-smi - For networking, if you don’t assign a fixed local IP address, the system will usually connect automatically after reboot. If you do need a static IP, you can configure it in the network settings, which is broadly similar to Windows.
- As for
node,python, and other environment setup issues, having AI help with the commands is much more convenient now. In the past, it usually meant searching around online and still not being sure the solution would work.
Now that Windows is gone and Ubuntu is in place, I’m going all in on open-source software.