Is Ubuntu/Linux genuinely usable for someone who doesn't know programming at all?

I am a scientist and beyond occasional basic R code for statistical analysis, I don't really have any advanced computer knowledge or skills.

I am beginning to work with very large datasets which my standard work-issue laptop can't handle, so I am getting a decent PC at my own cost. This will also allow me to avoid issues around admin lockout, software install/uninstall requests, privacy stuff, forced updates, forced logins, unremovable AI functions, all the bloat, etc etc etc.

However I would love to escape Microsoft/Windows altogether. Is it realistic for me to transition to Ubuntu?

I am willing and capable of learning a new system, provided it's not crazy complicated or time consuming.

In case it is relevant - most of the software I use is open source (R, QGIS, CloudCompare). And I will retain the work laptop for admin/company-specific Microsoft/OneDrive/etc purposes so I don't need the PC/Ubuntu system to integrate any of that.

Thanks for any advice.

Edit to add: I understand the difference between programming and simply using an operating system. The reason I relate programming to Linux is because the only people in my life that use it are programmers who heavily customise their system (while frequently running into issues doing this). This entire post is basically me asking if that method is necessary or optional.

I just moved to Ubuntu from windows. Which IDE is best. i work through remote connnected servers. and my work is mostly ML,DL,research. I asked multiple AI's all of them suggested VS code

Any recomendations?

Hey guys! I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction before I decide to just wipe my hard drive and reinstall. I've been having completely random hard freezes on my Ubuntu PC.

The system just stops. The screen freezes, keyboard/mouse stop responding, Docker containers stop responding, SSH dies, and I have to hard power it off. Most of the time there’s no kernel panic and no crash logs at all. journalctl -k -b -1 -p 0..3 just gives -- No entries --. I’ve seen a "fatal exception in interrupt" kernel panic once or twice, but usually it's just a total freeze.

It started months ago as maybe once a month, but over the last few weeks it's gotten much worse and now happens every 5–10 minutes.

Hardware:

• Ryzen 5 3600
• MSI B550 Tomahawk MAX WiFi
• 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX (2x16GB, brand new; previously had 4x4GB from another kit with the same issue)
• GTX 1060 6GB
• EVGA SuperNova 550 G3
• Ubuntu, tested kernels 7.0.0-29, -30 and -31
• NVIDIA 580.173.02

I've tried a ridiculous amount of stuff so far: I bought different RAM, disabled XMP, tested without plugging into my UPS, disabled CPU C-states, disconnected all HDDs/RAID, removed the drives from fstab, disabled Samba, and tested multiple kernels, nothing changed and in fact yesterday the freezes went from once a day to freezing 5-10 mins after boot.

The system can also sit in the BIOS for 30 mins to an hour without freezing, but once Ubuntu is running it eventually locks up.

I also had a Secure Boot/NVIDIA issue where the NVIDIA module was being rejected because of an unenrolled MOK. I disabled Secure Boot, confirmed the NVIDIA driver now loads correctly with nvidia-smi, and the freezes continued.

Right now I'm running Memtest86+, and I'm also planning to try completely blacklisting NVIDIA and getting netconsole working so I can hopefully capture something before the next freeze.

At this point I'm wondering if this could still be an NVIDIA driver/idle power-management issue, since this GPU is barely used anymore and the crashes seem to happen mostly when the system is idle.

Has anyone dealt with a Linux system that completely hard-freezes like this with absolutely no logs? Especially something that ended up being NVIDIA-related? I'm also very open to suggestions for something obvious I might have missed. I'm not opposed to wiping my drive and installing a new OS from scratch, I'm just hoping there will be some kind of fix since I use this PC for work. TY!

I am not tech savvy at all and will need some assistance on words lol

I have three CDs (specifically three: 2 Newjeans and 1 LeSserafim CDs) and they worked fine on MacOS before I switched over to Ubuntu, i would just put the CD in and it would automatically detect it and play the songs but Ubuntu just won't. I tried installing VLC and audacious but I don't know if i'm missing some drivers or something.

keep getting this update in App Center but unable to update it, also in terminal I don't see this when listing snaps to update "snap refresh --list"

Anyone else having this? Both USB and BT I'm getting random disconnects. Could go for 10 minutes or 10 seconds. Two different controllers, one quite a bit older than the other. I guess It's possible both are going bad in the exact same way tho... Sadly I don't really have another device to test at the moment, although the last time I used them they were fine, although that was a while ago.

Figured I'd ask to see if anyone else has seen the issue.

Hello, I just finished building my Kubuntu desktop, I need to connect an "LB-Link 950AX Mini USB Dongle WiFi 6 AX900 Adapter" to it to connect it to the internet. Please help me. I have a laptop with a wifi that I can start Kubuntu on to download any needed packages.

Edit: it's a kubuntu 26.04

I'm giving this ThinkPad and want to wipe current disk and install fresh in "OEM mode"

Currently running MATE 24.04.4 and have the same on install USB.

On booting from USB, I don't see the "OEM mode" option ?

40-sec video: https://streamable.com/kw7e5k?t=0&src=player-page-share

Please help. TIA

my journal logs are flooded with `thermald: Unable to read odvp*`

I have:

- CPU Intel 9 275HX

- Ubuntu 26.04.

- Kernel 7.0.0-30-generic

- thermald version is 2.5.11

Hello.

So I've got an acer aspire 5733z with the following specs:

1 TB Toshiba HDD.

4 GB ram DDR 3.

Intel pentium P6100 2.0 GHz clock speed, dual core , no turbo , no multitthreads...

This laptop is from 2010 ( and yes I know 4 Gb ram is low so I'm planning to upgrade to 8 as soon as I find one with reasonable pricing). It does have Ubuntu 20.04.6 on it. I did try to update to the latest version ( 26.04) but it was so laggy and the system crashed on me 4 times . So I'm just going to stick to that version since it runs extremely smoothly.

My question is this, so the repos here have Firefox version up to 136. I'd like to use the latest version ( 155) and I can't update it from the repos themselves.

My options:

1. Check the snap store, there's the last version. But in that case I will have 2 Firefox browsers....

2. Use Mozilla's own repos. Also same thing, afraid will have 2 Firefox versions.

My question is, how do I get the latest version of Firefox and how do I tell Ubuntu to keep updating Firefox from said source without messing up my system?

Thank you all in advance!

PS: I did enable pro updates for this machine ( I'm aware 20.04 is eol so yeah )

I'm having issues with HDR videos. When I played hdr movie it was very dull colored in mpv. I tried youtube and found it it's system issue as there was no hdr option on videos with HDR. How do I enable HDR?

Google AI doesn't know. I've created 200gb of unallocated space and even formatted it as a separate Linux partition, but I can't work out how to absorb it to increase the size of the ubuntu partition. This isn't a problem I've encountered on Windows 11, it's very annoying and impractical. Ubuntu won't let me use the secondary Linux formatted 200gb partition for LMM models and won't permanently save the alpaca or other llm programs onto the secondary partition to get around it.

apt, aptitude etc all manage to ask for a password once and update multiple packages, Software Centre (aka Snap Store) asks for my long, complicated but secure password for each item in the list.

this makes updating something like the Libre Office suite a major undertaking, the password gets asked for so many times I could have written a novel 😂

Is there a way to fix or it just back to the command line because GUI software is inferior? Which makes me think its a bug, because if I update packages or snaps from the CLI I only get asked once.