Ubuntu. If you already know what it is, you can skip this post. If you don’t, read on.
My flight from Dublin to Vienna was almost empty. So as soon as the seatbelt sign went off, I moved a few rows back, slipped into an empty row, and laid down — one of the (only) perks of flying during COVID.
I woke up with the whole riot that comes along when a plane starts descending, sat straight, and buckled my seatbelt. As soon as we landed, I stood up and grabbed my backpack from the luggage compartment a few rows in front. I was one of the first ones to exit. I had a very short layover and was not going to waste any time.
As I squeezed past a queue of masked and weary travelers for passport control, a woman came up to me. She was very nervous, and with good reason. I had taken her backpack. Damn. Meaning I left mine. I tried to go back to the aircraft, but they wouldn’t let me in. After standing 15 minutes by my flight’s baggage carousel, I decided to sprint to my gate.
I figured that losing my backpack and flight was worse than just losing my backpack, so I decided to leave Vienna — and my trustworthy 2012 Mac laptop — behind.
Of course, work is not going to wait until I recover my laptop, so I decided to dust off a cheap ASUS I use for writing and get some serious work done.
I immediately realized no work was going to get done. The ASUS was so slow I could open a website, go make coffee, come back, and it would still take a few seconds to load. Getting work done on this laptop was like riding through an Autobahn on a horse carriage.
A friend who has a web development company suggested me to replace Windows with Ubuntu. Ubuntu is an operating system, like Windows or macOS, only that it’s free and is much lighter.
I had nothing to lose, so I went with it.
Well…what a good suggestion. In roughly 30 minutes I felt like I was using a completely different laptop. It was overwhelmingly faster. I was cruising through the Autobahn, on a Lambo.
To install Ubuntu you need:
- A USB with at least 4GB of memory.
- Follow this tutorial.
The procedure is easy, and anyone can do it. It just took me a few attempts to find my laptop’s boot key.
In Ubuntu’s installation onboarding, I chose to erase Windows. If you select this option, just make sure to backup your data.
And that’s it. If your laptop is so slow you can’t even do basic work, installing Ubuntu is the best thing you can do. It’s the closest thing to giving your laptop superpowers. And Ubuntu has everything I need for work, even it’s own Office Suite.
P.S: I wrote this post, quite quickly, on the ASUS, using the LibreOffice Writer. Ubuntu’s Word equivalent.