With Home windows 10 help at an finish, and Window 11 nonetheless a little bit of an AI-riddle mess, there has by no means been a lot curiosity in attempting out Linux as there may be immediately. In case you’re in search of a Linux distro that shall be straightforward to regulate to when coming from Home windows, look no additional than Kubuntu.

Kubuntu resembles Home windows

One of many greatest hindrances while you swap between working methods is the consumer interace. How do you open and shut apps? The place do you discover apps? What’s navigating the settings menu like?

On this regard, Kubuntu shines.

The taskbar and “Begin menu” very carefully resemble the type of factor you’d discover in Home windows. I believe Kubuntu’s Begin menu is especially harking back to Home windows 10’s Begin Menu, which featured various pinned packages on the proper aspect and an inventory of your purposes on the left. You may pin new apps to it by right-clicking them and deciding on “Add to favorites.”

The Kubuntu Start Menu closely resembles Windows 10.

The Settings app can also be extraordinarily intuitive, and I might examine favorably it to the Settings menu you’d discover on macOS. Not like Home windows, you have got just one place it’s essential to go to search out issues. You needn’t bear in mind which setting is buried within the Management Panel and which setting has been halfheartedly ported into the newer Settings app.

The Settings app is better than Windows 11.

As one ultimate bonus, discovering and putting in apps on Kubuntu (like most Linux distros) is less complicated than on Home windows. You simply use the Uncover app to deal with including, updating, and eradicating purposes, and system updates. I might advocate beginning with the KDE apps in the event you want an app for one thing—they’re normally glorious.

The Discover app on Kubuntu.

These are only a few examples, however the precept holds all through the consumer interface: in the event you’re used to Home windows, you will really feel proper at house with KDE Plasma on Kubuntu.

Kubuntu’s default apps are higher than Home windows

Nobody needs to begin utilizing a brand new working system solely to should chase down one million completely different apps simply to make use of their PC like they usually would, and right here, as soon as once more, Kubuntu shines.

Kubuntu is a modified model of Ubuntu, which trades out Ubuntu’s regular desktop atmosphere for KDE Plasma.

GNOME logo and KDE Plasma logo side by side.


GNOME vs. KDE Plasma: Top Linux Desktops Compared

Which desktop atmosphere would you decide?

Kubuntu additionally comes preloaded with a handful of fantastic KDE apps, like Okular (a doc viewer), Dolphin (a file explorer), and Konsole, which is the Terminal. Spectacle, the included screenshot program, is no less than as succesful because the Home windows Snipping Instrument, and I might argue higher in most methods.

My favourite included app is KDE Join, which lets you pair your cellphone together with your PC over your native space community in an effort to use your PC to ship and obtain texts, alternate recordsdata between your cellphone and your PC, and management both gadget. I’ve put it towards Microsoft’s Telephone Hyperlink on just a few events and located that KDE Join is constantly extra dependable—spectacular for one thing that’s fully free.

Above and past what’s included while you set up the working system, KDE additionally produces a slew of different packages which you could rely on to fulfill your wants out of the field. Kdenlive, a video modifying program, can maintain its personal towards Adobe Premiere and DaVinci resolve. Kate is a sophisticated textual content editor akin to Microsoft’s VS Code.

I’ve tried a ton of the KDE apps through the years, and whereas I do not use all of them each day, they’re all good. Having a one-stop-shop for your whole fundamental (and typically superior) utility wants makes shifting from Home windows to Linux manner simpler than it is perhaps in any other case.

Debian and Kubuntu have nice help

Ubuntu is probably the most well-known Linux distro, and the underlying Linux distro—Debian—powers a ton of different well-liked distros, like Linux Mint. Kubuntu itself is largely Ubuntu. What does that imply for the tip consumer? Documentation for every thing.

Whether or not you are attempting to troubleshoot an error or in the event you simply need to do one thing difficult, utilizing a system based mostly on Ubuntu (Debian) means that there’s an unlimited quantity of help obtainable on the web for every thing. That goes a really lengthy technique to making the transition from Home windows to Linux manner much less painful than it could be in the event you wanted to hunt by means of dozens or a whole bunch of pages of technical documentation simply to type out a fundamental concern.

The one space you possibly can’t lean on Ubuntu options for is the desktop atmosphere, since Kubuntu makes use of KDE Plasma moderately than GNOME. Nevertheless, KDE Plasma is very popular itself, and you are not more likely to have any drawback discovering discussions and options associated to any concern chances are you’ll face.

Kubuntu runs on something

Home windows is notoriously bloated as of late, and Home windows 11 would not assist the difficulty. Furthermore, Home windows 11 additionally imposes some fairly stringent {hardware} necessities: 4GB of RAM, it solely helps “fashionable” CPUs, and also you want TPM 2.0—one thing not present in numerous PCs which might be completely succesful.

As soon as once more, Kubuntu—like most different Linux distros—excels on this space. You would run it on a single GB of RAM and an historical dual-core processor in the event you actually needed to. In observe, I’ve run Kubuntu 25.04 on methods with a quad-core from 2010 and solely 8GB of RAM and located it’s snappy and responsive, whereas Home windows 11 dragged horribly on the identical system. After I put Kubuntu on my now 5-year-old laptop computer, I went from worrying about how quickly I might want to purchase a brand new laptop computer to a tool that feels and runs like it’s model new.

Tux mascot jumping from Windows to Linux.


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I have never missed Home windows but.

In case you do discover that Kubuntu is a bit sluggish on an older system, you may as well flip down the visible results within the settings menu to make sure you get higher efficiency.


As soon as, switching to Linux was a bit tough. The consumer interface wasn’t as absolutely developed as Home windows, and also you usually needed to lean on a command-line interface to get staple items finished. At this time, that is not the case—I have never touched the command-line for a “common” activity in all the time I have been utilizing Kubuntu. And, as an added plus, you do not even have to surrender gaming anymore, largely resulting from Proton, a compatibility layer included with Steam.


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