I’ve been a Windows user pretty much my whole life. The first PC I remember using as a child was Windows 98. After that I had Windows PCs exclusively with one exception - my laptop at university. For the most part, that was down to ease of use, particularly as a PC gamer.

But over the years I’ve witnessed Windows get progressively worse. There have been performance disasters like Aero in Vista, awful UI in the form of Windows 8, gradual performance erosion over time, and adverts inside my desktop environment. Then there has been the Recall fiasco, forcing Microsoft accounts to complete setup, and shoving Copilot down everyone’s throats. It’s just becoming a very unpleasant experience to use.

Unfortunately, I’m currently forced to use Windows at work, which means that I’ve got plenty of time to suffer through the issues. But, for my home setup I’m free to do what I wish - so I decided earlier in the year that I would be leaving Windows and moving over to Linux.

It wasn’t the first time I used Linux - but it was the first time I was trying to make a full switch without having Windows as a fallback. But what should I choose? There are so many distro options available, but I essentially narrowed it down to either Ubuntu or Arch.

Ubuntu is fairly well known for being the simple option. It’s generally considered to be plug-and-play, albeit with a dated out-of-the-box UI. I’d also come across Omakub and was interested in how Ubuntu had been customised and made keyboard-first. I also had some vague negative memories that Arch could be fairly awkward and temperamental. I wanted something reliable, so decided I’d go with plain Ubuntu and tweak it myself once I’d become accustomed to my new desktop environment.

That was near the start of the year, so how did it go?

Well, I’ve used my laptop almost daily since I made the switch, and it’s been mostly smooth sailing. I have hit a couple of snags though which are making me reconsider my choice of using Ubuntu.

First up, I use a dual monitor setup at home, and I have had some issues with monitor detection. I’m not going to put the blame directly at Ubuntu’s door on this one though - after all, it is an Nvidia GPU and their Linux issues are fairly notorious.

My main problem here is monitor detection. Sometimes I turn my laptop on, and it doesn’t detect my additional monitors. The usual solution to this has been to either disconnect and reconnect them, or failing that to restart the laptop. Not the end of the world, but slightly frustrating.

My second problem happened after a kernel update. One day, I turned on my laptop and both WiFi and Bluetooth had stopped working. In standard fashion, it happened at the worst possible time - when I urgently needed to get onto my laptop to look at an issue with a live release.

So to get around it quickly, I took the nuclear option and reinstalled Ubuntu - which fixed it temporarily at least. But it did come up again a few weeks later, and as it turned out it was from a kernel update.

I’m still not sure whether this was an issue in the main kernel or specific to Canonical’s version, but the workaround I took was to enable the GRUB menu and go back to a previous version of the kernel. It took a bit of fiddling with secure boot options and GRUB config, but I got there in the end. Not quite the plug-and-play experience I had been expecting.

Last up, is the Snap package manager. Many people have written at length about Snap, and argued around the Pros and Cons. It has been convenient for some of the things I’ve needed, and I understand the security reasons behind the isolated environments. The thing that has irritated me though, is the speed of the applications.

On my laptop at least, there is sometimes a noticeable hang when you try to open an application that has been installed as a Snap package. It’s a very minor thing but as someone that has moved away from Windows partially due to performance reasons, it doesn’t feel great to experience.

Other issues I’ve had with Snap packages were config not being found in expected places (leading to issues when trying to tweak application settings), and Snap packages not being published by verified sources leading to some question marks over authenticity. Finally, not everything is available as a Snap, so you’re still left trying to either manually install .deb files or add PPAs. In a lot of the cases I’ve seen, these things that require PPAs for Ubuntu are available for either Flatpak or Pacman.

It feels like people are somewhat avoiding Snap, and having multiple package managers installed seems to defeat the point. I don’t think Canonical will abandon Snap, but at the moment it feels like it just adds a barrier to installing some applications.

Overall then, not too many complaints, but not quite the smooth experience I was hoping for. As I reach the end of 2025, I have a few choices. Do I stick with Ubuntu and look at making some tweaks? Do I leave Ubuntu for something considered more reliable like Linux Mint? Or do I make the switch to Arch - and exchange some reliability for flexibility? One thing I know for sure - I won’t be going back to Windows any time soon.