Hey y’all, just finally got around to upgrading my Framework 13 to a 3rd gen i5, and I’m sick of windows. It’s been a long time since I’ve used Linux, but I’d like to switch fully to it and just get rid of Windows all together. I’ve only ever used Ubuntu in the past so I will probably stick with that distro unless there’s another one that’s also simple to use. Is there an easy way to completely wipe my drive and start fresh with Ubuntu? I don’t have anything important on the drive of this laptop as I mostly use it for web browsing and work things in browsers. I was struggling to find any good information on it so hopefully y’all can help. Thanks in advance!
Also I want to add that I use OneDrive and Google Drive both a lot for work, is this gonna cause me issues, or will I be able to access both of those from the websites no issues?
Ubuntu is a good choice. It’s been my go-to distribution ever since I started using Linux (seventeen years ago now? Sheesh, time flies!). I’ve tried several others, and they’re all pretty similar these days, but Ubuntu seems to require just a little less work to set up, at least for the way I use it.
(I have heard good things about Linux Mint as well, but I’ve never tried that one.)
I don’t use Google Drive or OneDrive, so I can’t comment knowledgeably on either of those. However, I’d be surprised if Google Drive didn’t work with Linux, a good portion of Google’s engineers seem to prefer Linux systems themselves.
OneDrive might be more of a problem, since Microsoft has a vested interest in promoting Windows instead. However, a quick search turned up a OneDrive client for Linux, and a second one, and it looks like you can use rclone with it as well.
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Awesome! Thanks so much for looking in to that for me haha. I definitely could have but figured the community here might already know.
I’m in the same boat sort of, I took a class in high school 15 years ago where we dabbled in Ubuntu and worked on creating Quake servers and a few others things and I had the joy of having the pc that had Ubuntu on it so I somewhat became familiar with it. Looking foward to tinkering and learning about it again. Thanks for the reply!
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I might be wrong, since I haven’t installed Ubuntu personally, but during install you should be able to choose to format/wipe the entire drive, which would effectively remove windows (and any other data on the drive)
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When installing, you have 3 options:
- Install Linux alongside Windows
- Erase entire disk and install Linux
- Something else
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Cool thanks for the replies! I’ll start working on it now and hopefully it’s easy enough for me to figure out.
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For those that are curious, I got Ubuntu installed last night with not too many troubles. Was way easier than I thought it would be. I ran into a hiccup with my main drive being encrypted by bit locker so the Ubuntu couldn’t wipe the drive even though I never have used bit locker on Windows. I turned it on and back off again and it fixed the issue. Thank god I still had a USB thumb drive still floating around my apartment. Been using the laptop all morning and it’s so much better to use now without Windows.
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Congratulations! Yeah, Microsoft has been doing that recently, switching on BitLocker whether you asked for it or not. Makes a dual-boot system that much harder to set up; it bit me when I got my Framework 16 a month ago too. Not cool, M$.
Depending on whether I ever actually boot into Windows on that machine, it may be the last one that I bother putting a copy of Windows on. I don’t think I’ve ever used the copy on my two-year-old desktop, and I don’t recall using the one on my five-year-old previous laptop either. Microsoft seems to be going out of its way to make installing and using Windows a pain in the tail, and then grabs as much info as they can (presumably to sell to advertisers) even if you paid full price for a retail copy of the OS. Now they’re putting ads in the Start menu too?! 
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Look here. Original advice was for a Mac user – ignore the Mac specific parts. Also, read below that on backups, following it may save your bacon more than once…
I have since moved from Manjaro (too unstable at that time with the combaination of lack of drivers(?) for the FW13gen11, my heavy tinkering, and being a rolling release) to openSUSE Tumbleweed w/KDE, which turned out to be a good choice.
Especially the rollback (f*ed up system? snapper list to see the snapshots—snapper restore NNN to select one—reboot into that system state. User folder remains untouched. A matter of minutes, and snapshots are active out of the box.
A full system upgrade (everything to latest stable) requires merely: logout of GUI (better to not have it running while being upgraded)—switch to different session with ctrl-alt-F4 (or higher Fx)—login as root—zypper dup—confirm the changes—go for coffee—reboot on return.
Updates are tried on >100 test sytems before they are distributed that makes it very stable despite being a rolling release, and if still something bad happened there it is fixed within days. Documentation is good. Forum is helpful and very active.
Only the repository system may appear confusing at first (“priorities”? “vendor change”?). If not done right, software sources with differing software versions may interfere with other. Read a little before changing the OOB setup, and a helpful forum will answer the remaining questions and tell you if your setup is OK.
Now that openSUSE Slow Roll is maturing (ASAP updates for security and bug fixes, monthly for everything else) it will be even better. I plan to hop there during winter holidays.
Edit: Unfortunately SUSE is less frequently chosen by consumers. Programmers of more specialized obscure apps may not provide a ready-made binary or repo installation and you’d have to learn to build it yourself. (And even that may not work – looking at you Treesheets, only really working as Windows incarnation under WINE or in a Kubuntu VM! Pshhhffftt!) But this rarely happens.
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