The creation process will format your USB drive, so be sure to backup or copy any data on the disk before continuing. Insert your chosen flash drive into your computer, and open balenaEtcher. To do this, you'll require a device with a minimum of 4GB of storage space to install Ubuntu. Once you've installed balenaEtcher, you'll need to create the installation USB stick. For home use, you can stick with the standard Ubuntu release.Ĭlicking on your chosen edition will download an ISO file containing the Ubuntu operating system. LTS releases are more suitable for professional or server environments, where the risk of change is higher. LTS editions of the operating system are released every two years and are supported for five years. New editions of Ubuntu are released every six months and are supported for nine months. There are two editions of Ubuntu Desktop the latest release and a Long Term Support (LTS) version. You are presented with several options, but for home use, you'll want to download Ubuntu Desktop. This means you can get a copy of Ubuntu to use on any PC, laptop, or server, free of charge directly from the Ubuntu website. To complement this, Linux operating systems like Ubuntu are available for free.
Linux is part of the open-source community, meaning that anyone can help develop the software and contribute to the code.