Installing Ubuntu Linux on an Old ThinkPad Windows 11 Won't Support

We're going to put a new operating system on this ThinkPad. This one has an 8th Gen i5 processor in it, so it's getting a little bit older, but it still works wonderfully. And, if you know, you know, ThinkPads have the best keyboards out of any laptop ever, so this thing is still a dream to type on. But I'm not going to upgrade it to Windows 11, so it's time to put something else on here. So, what are the options here? Well, I could keep Windows on it if I wanted, but what's the fun in that? Linux is going to be the... choice or you could do something like turn it into a hackintosh so we're gonna do Linux for this and there are a lot of different options this isn't even a drop in the bucket but I'll tell you right now this video is geared more towards people who are thinking about doing something like this but haven't before so I'm gonna go through the process really quick but as you'll find in this video it's really easy to switch to install something else so you could try a whole bunch if you wanted to that's what I'm gonna be doing in the near future but today just for simple I think I'm going to go Ubuntu on this. So if you've never done this before, we need two things to get started. Number one, you get your distro. In this case, it's Ubuntu .com and you download it. Under downloads, there are a few different options. We just want the desktop for this one. These other ones are more specialty stuff that we just don't really care about right now. So desktop, download the desktop, and then here you're going to find just a few versions. The older ones are buried somewhere, but these are the latest. part you're going to want LTS that stands for long -term support so if you install this they're planning on coming out with updates and stuff like that for quite a while yet so 24042 there's also 2504 which is not LTS and if you want even older ones that would be more if you want it for a specific purpose you can go to releases .ubuntu .com here are some options LTS non -LTS and you can scroll down and there are all sorts of older versions. But like I mentioned in this case we're going to go for the newest LTS and we're just going to download it. We're going to put it on a USB drive and that brings us to part two of what we need to prepare for this. Hardware wise we'll be using a USB drive to put the ISO that we're downloading onto this and boot the computer from that. Now if you have a Windows machine you can use Ventoy, Windows or Linux actually, you can use Ventoy that's one of my favorite tools. I'm going to do this on a Mac just to kind of cover all here. So I'm going to take a fresh USB drive and we're going to use something called Etcher. Now all of these tools work wonderfully but if you're on a Windows or Linux machine, Ventoy is my top choice. Rufus is a really great second choice and we're going to use Belena Etcher since I'm doing this on my Mac. All three of those utilities are free to download and use and once you open up Belena Etcher this is what it looks like. So I'm going to take my USB drive, plug it into the computer and our ISO downloaded. We're going to flash from file. I'm going to select my Ubuntu file. I'm going to select my target, and that is going to be my USB drive right there, the bottom one. So we're going to click that, hit select, and flash. It's going to say, do you really want to do this? Yes, I do. And then it's going to start flashing. It'll probably take a few minutes. Then we're going to eject this, take it out, and put it in the other computer. And while this is going on, what this does, it's a little bit different than just dragging this ISO. So to the USB drive, this actually makes it so that it's bootable by the computer. It adds some extra files to it so that when you put it in a computer, it sees this as a bootable device, not just as an extra storage device. And while that finishes up, over to the computer. Chances are we're going to have to go into the BIOS or UEFI on your computer. Oftentimes that's by pressing something like delete or F10 or F8 or F1 or F2 or something. It's different depending on the computer. But once you get to this sort of screen, we want to go to... and we want to look for secure boot right down here and in there you want to make sure that it is disabled while we're installing this otherwise we're going to run into issues so with it disabled we're going to go over to restart and make sure you exit saving changes and then yes back over here we can see flash completed and it verified all right plugging this into the computer we're going to boot up and this is another case where some computers are just going to boot from this automatically other ones you have to tell it to boot from a different device. So I interrupted my startup in this one. I'm going to press F12 to choose a temporary startup device. That's going to bring me to another menu where I'm going to choose from either the internal hard drive, this USB drive. If I had a CD -ROM, maybe I could do that. So for this, I'm going to do USB HDD, and then it's going to start booting into the ISO that we just loaded onto here. So right here, we're going to try or install Ubuntu services. And that's one cool thing about a lot of Linux distributions is you can just try it. It's called like a live CD where you boot from this and you run the whole OS from this and it doesn't touch your hard drive. You can put this in pretty much any computer that's capable of running it and it will temporarily let you load your Linux distribution without messing with your Windows, without messing with your Mac OS, whatever it is. So it's pretty cool. As it continues to boot up, we'll see this a couple times and then it's going to go into a main GUI. it can do further setup and choose to install it to this computer, or not. While finishing up the boot process, it's going to load the welcome screen. And this is just a simple step-by-step process. Choose your language, choose your keyboard layout, choose your time zone, stuff like that. So this is basically just next, next, next. At this point, if you choose to connect it to your Wi-Fi, which I just did, then you can update as this installs, or you can skip that, just install it like normal. and worry about updates later it doesn't really matter one way or the other and then on the next screen this is where we can choose do we just want to try it and again that's not going to touch the internal hard drive or your os that's already already on here this is all right off the usb and this can be really useful for using different utilities like maybe you're having issues with your computer you could do various scans on the hard drive stuff like that but in this case since we're installing it on this laptop i'm going to choose that top one install ubuntu and then more questions you can look through these all you would like but for the most part the defaults are going to be just fine you can choose to install third -party software or not i usually do this bottom one right here download and install for additional media formats that does make it so that when you're playing video files and stuff like that you don't have to download them later then on this screen you can choose to dual or multi -boot that means that if you do have windows on here you could put ubuntu on it along Alongside Windows, if you have enough space on the drive, I'm actually going to erase and start from scratch on this disk. Here you can choose a name for your account, just put in whatever you think would be best. You can choose your time zone, and then this shows you all of the stuff you chose this far, and you can hit install. And then it's going to take a few minutes, copy the files over, we're going to reboot, and we're going to boot into Ubuntu on this laptop. So as it's going through this instance, I'll wrap up this video and one reason I wanted to make this video is because of Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11. So Windows 10 is going to be unsupported pretty soon. Microsoft really wants people to upgrade to Windows 11. A lot of computers can't do that. They want you to buy a new computer and there are ways around that but this is one of the ways around it and I wanted to get more used to Linux for a long time now. It's a really useful operating system and in this video I wanted to show how easy it is. Say this had Windows on it, I could have prepared this USB drive on this computer, then booted to it, installed it, and it's a done deal. It's really that easy. Linux has come such a far way in recent years in user friendliness, in compatibility, in gaming, in pretty much everything. So now is the perfect time to load Linux on a computer and check it out. At the end of the install, you take out your USB, you restart the computer, it loads to your login, and there we go. We have it. desktop, we have a welcome screen, we have some icons, you can do all sorts of stuff, start exploring.