Wubuntu: The lovechild of Windows and Linux nobody asked for

Wubuntu is a stripped-down Kubuntu, with custom themes and additional tools to make it look (a lot) and work (superficially) like Windows 11.

The identity crisis starts with its name. While the primary website is wubuntu.org, that name is rarely seen inside the OS itself. Other parts of the website call it “Windows Theme on Linux” or “Windows Theme Over Linux.” Internally, it calls itself “Windows Ubuntu,” “Windows Linux,” “Windows Linux With Copilot,” and occasionally “Winux”.

(That’s not all: it also appears “Wubuntu” is very similar to a different distro called LinuxFX, which looks identical.)

Wubuntu’s news page acknowledges that it’s based on Kubuntu 24.04.1 LTS. It’s not merely Kubuntu with some custom theme, though. The themes really are remarkably like the wallpaper and icons found in Microsoft’s not-even-slightly open source OS. You can see the wallpapers for yourself on GitHub under the name Win11OS KDE Theme, and some of the other art under Win11 Icon Theme. To our inexpert eyes, they look uncannily like the originals in Windows itself. The boot screen is the modern, flat, square Windows logo, and the icons on the taskbar are indistinguishable from those in Windows itself, including the Copilot logo. The project logo is the Ubuntu “circle of friends” logo, with the rhombus-shaped Windows 8 logo in the center.

The main theme repository contains a copy of the GPL3, but there is no mention of the images’ origins or creators.

The Wubuntu main desktop is very Windows-like… Right down to the nag screen asking for your money – click to enlarge

The developers told us: “Microsoft themes and icons are open sourced by the following projects: KDE look Windows 11 Theme (https://github.com/yeyushengfan258/Win11OS-kde), KDE look Windows 11 Icons: (https://github.com/yeyushengfan258/Win11-icon-theme. Now about the Copilot icon, this is made available by Microsoft itself when you create a WebApp through Ms-Edge.”

They added: “Wubuntu is just a Windows theme applied on top of Ubuntu and as you can see in the links above, we are not the ones who develop it, we just deploy these themes and package them as a distribution.”

“Windows” with a capital letter, is one of Microsoft’s many registered trademarks [PDF], and as such can only be used under these terms – along with OneDrive, Copilot, and others. The same goes for the name “Ubuntu,” of course: that’s also a registered trademark.

Of course, it could be that Microsoft and Canonical have given their approval and blessing to both Wubuntu and LinuxFX, but the projects didn’t mention it. That seems unlikely to us, given the Wubuntu website’s description that it is:

That seems like a comment that Microsoft wouldn’t be pleased to endorse, though we could be wrong. After all, Microsoft Loves Linux.

We tried Wubuntu 11.24.04.2 LTS, which seems to be based on the core of Ubuntu 24.04. On the system information page, under the heading “PowerTools Specifications,” it calls itself “Windows Linux 11.24.04.2” and the OS build is described as “BUILD CYBER 111624.2 FINAL-LTS.” Although there is a separate free download of PowerTools, the app seems to be paid, proprietary software.

Wubuntu removes some apps that are common to most official Ubuntu flavors, sometimes replacing them with a more Windows-like alternative, or sometimes several alternatives. It also adds fairly significant additional components. In some places, it goes to considerable lengths to be familiar to folks who only know Windows users; in others, things are unmodified from the standard KDE or Kubuntu behavior.

There’s even a ‘winver’ command, which both runs Neofetch and displays a dialog box – click to enlarge

There’s no Firefox included, but the distro comes with both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. That seems excessive to us. It doesn’t include LibreOffice, but instead you get links to the free Microsoft 365 Online applications, including the browser-based version of Copilot. For local use, the Microsoft-compatible OnlyOffice is preinstalled.

An assortment of other useful tools are preinstalled. There’s no official Linux client for Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage, but you get the free OneDrive client for Linux. The development version of WINE is preloaded, as is a VM for the PrimeOS Android runtime, allowing some Windows and Android apps to install and run. You also get Valve’s Steam client. There’s no Snap, which some will see as a win, but there is Flatpak, although no packages are installed by default. The distro’s replacement for the Microsoft Store is KDE Discover.

The taskbar has the same icons as in Windows 11, although they are mostly labeled “Run Command” and open KDE tools. So, what looks like the Widgets button opens the KDE widgets launcher (but we couldn’t get any widgets to open). The Cortana button opens Kubuntu’s Run dialog. The Settings button opens Wubuntu’s system-admin program, which is called PowerTools. It’s laid out more like the Windows Settings app than the stock KDE control panel, but the snag is that you have to pay $35 to register it.

The normal KDE Plasma System Settings tool is there and you can run systemsettings from a shell, revealing that the desktop is Plasma 5.27.11. That might be an option if you want to try Wubuntu without paying to register PowerTools.

The LinuxFX desktop is almost identical, but left-aligned and a bit more Windows 10-like – click to enlarge

We also grabbed a copy of the latest version of LinuxFX and tried it. They are not identical – but it’s close. The key differences we saw were that LinuxFX booted and ran happily on a BIOS-based VM in VirtualBox 7.1, while Wubuntu would only boot on a UEFI-based VM, and LinuxFX had a more Windows 10-like desktop layout, with left-aligned taskbar entries rather than centered, combined with a slightly more Windows-10 style start menu, without the tiles.

We’re not going to go into a great deal more depth about either Wubuntu or LinuxFX. In both cases you can get the same functionality from other distributions. If you do consider paying for either Wubuntu or LinuxFX, it’s worth keeping in mind that in the past, the developer’s activation system and registration database have both been investigated and found to be horribly insecure. However, from the database, it looks like some 20,000 people did pay.

It does look good, and probably reassuringly familiar to Microsoft users. However, the resemblance to Windows is only skin-deep. Really, it’s KDE Plasma with additional themes, plus a proprietary control panel and bundled freeware. We feel you may be better off with Linux Mint or Linux Lite, plus your own installation of WINE, OnlyOffice, and whatever else takes your fancy. ®