Windows 11 is now being rolled out; and as with every other time Microsoft have released a new
version of Windows, the Linux fanboys have crawled out of their basements to tell everyone they
should upgrade to Linux instead. Well, here's my laptop. Let's see if they have a point!
Welcome back to The Pro Tech Show. To avoid any overly generic interpretations of this video: I'm
considering my specific use case on my specific laptop. That doesn't mean the answer will be the
same for everybody. To set the scene then, my laptop is a secondary device. I don't do my main work on
it or edit my videos on it. I do normal person stuff with it - browsing the internet, checking
my emails, editing a few documents, calling family, watching a bit of YouTube. If you've watched the
channel before you'll know I'm not new to Linux. In fact some of the most popular content on this
channel is about Linux; but I don't consider myself a full-blown expert and I actually have relatively
little experience of Linux on the desktop. Most of my experience is on servers and servers tend
to look like this. I've used Linux desktops, sure; you've seen me do it; but there's a difference
between logging on to perform a discrete task and actually living with it day in, day out on
your personal device. The last time I did that was about 15 years ago and yes: now I feel old, thanks.
I think this puts me in an interesting position to review the modern Linux desktop experience, though.
There will be some issues but I'm familiar enough with Linux that I ought to be able to work my way
around most of them. I won't run away when I see a terminal. However, when something doesn't quite
work in desktop-land I will have to actually troubleshoot it. Hopefully this means I can
give you a balanced viewpoint. The distro I chose was Fedora. I like Red Hat and its derivatives on
servers but they're focused on server use cases and a bit slow-moving. Fedora is more cutting edge
and has more packages readily available so I think it makes a lot of sense for a desktop install.
I don't think it's stable enough for server use. I've had a few minor crashes over the past
couple of weeks so I'm sticking with Red Hat or derivatives like Rocky or AlmaLinux on servers;
but Fedora is fine for the desktop. How did it fare compared to Windows, though? Well it had its ups and
its downs. I'm going to attempt to plot them on a graph as we go so you can keep track. Right
away Linux gets a point for just working without whinging at me about unsupported processors. It's
a low bar to set but it beats Windows 11 on my four and a half year old laptop. It gains another point
for the install process. The ability to run live off the USB to check your device actually works
with it is a handy touch and the setup process was much less annoying than Windows. I'm not convinced
it was any faster than Windows but it didn't keep stopping to ask me questions. The windows setup
process peaked about Windows Vista when it got mouse support, and now these days it seems to spend less
time actually installing Windows than it does trying to get your consent for data harvesting.
Linux just got on with installing the operating system which is all I wanted it to do.
Once installed our happy graph starts to take a nosedive as we begin setting up all the additional
pieces needed to make it work properly. This is one area where Linux struggles. It shouldn't be a
major issue if you know your way around Linux but the sort of problems I encountered are what puts
newbies off using Linux. I think it's important to call these out because people are shouting on
the internet that everyone should switch to Linux, it's really easy, and you don't need any technical
skills. I don't agree. There are benefits of moving to Linux but you do need at least a willingness
to learn some technical skills because it's only a matter of time before you hit a problem that leads
you to typing commands into the terminal. If you don't understand what you're doing at this point
then you're just pasting commands from random people on the internet, often with root privileges,
and that's dangerous. For example, I want my hard drive to be encrypted but I want it to
unlock automatically on boot. The laptop has a TPM so this should be perfectly possible, and it
works in Windows right out of the box. Enabling the encryption was just a tickbox during the install,
so top marks there; but setting up TPM unlock was a bit more of a mission. To do this I needed
to install some additional software and run a few commands at the terminal. The final series of steps
looks something like this. A few things of note: these commands are only there to work around a bug.
This isn't something I've done before so I was following online guides. I kept getting
errors but it turned out to be a known issue with this package. The package isn't necessary
at this stage, though; so I could work around the problem by uninstalling it, setting up the TPM
decryption, and reinstalling it. Another thing of note are these numbers. Different guides suggested
different numbers. The numbers refer to methods of checking the system hasn't been tampered with.
Any combination would have worked but most of the guides didn't tell you this and just said
"Copy these numbers." No explanation as to what they were or why they differed in other guides,
which I think people will find confusing. This line was missing from a lot of guides but it won't work
without it, and this piece here was again different in different guides with no explanation as to why.
Of course, it's your hard drive partition. What's the big deal? Well the big deal is that the guide
I was using didn't say that, it said this. I saw that, knew my laptop doesn't have an NVMe drive,
and changed it appropriately; but think about your average Windows computer user... Do they know
what type of drive they have? Would they even know that's what this line of text refers to?
I think not. I think they'd copy-paste the command, it wouldn't work, and they'd just assume Linux is
broken. On Windows this entire process is automatic and requires zero knowledge. Until Linux is as easy
as that it's going to remain a niche platform for techies and the year of Linux on the desktop
will never arrive. Besides, after doing all of this the laptop still prompted me for a
decryption password anyway. That turned out to be a bug as well. The TPM did actually release the
key correctly, and it did decrypt the drive, and the operating system was booting the whole time
behind the password screen. If I just waited then once fedora got the login screen the password
box suddenly disappeared. Fine once you know, but I wasted a lot of time troubleshooting a non-issue.
I also had problems with screen rotation not working until I manually modified the chassis type so GNOME
would believe it was in fact a convertible device. On the upside, whilst GNOME may rather stupidly rely
on a hard-coded list of device models and ignore the actual hardware signals to say "Hey, this is in
tablet mode!", at least Linux actually lets me change stuff like this. The final issue I had was getting
my printer to work. Isn't it always a printer? Fedora came with drivers for it but they didn't
work. I got the driver from the manufacturer but it had dependencies and those dependencies weren't
in any of the normal repos. When your software is in the repos, Linux package management is awesome.
When it's not, installing software is a ball-ache because now you're on an internet-wide treasure
hunt to find all the missing pieces. Now let's talk about actually using the desktop.
I didn't like the default GNOME experience. I know this is a bit subjective but just look
at the experience of switching between programs. When you minimize anything it disappears into a
dock that's then hidden from view unless you jump out of your workspace and into the Activities menu.
You can hit the Windows key to make this quicker or you could Alt-Tab through;
but if you intend to use the mouse (which is a perfectly reasonable and normal thing to do)
look at how it's laid out! The activities button is all the way up here. The dock is all the way
down here. You can't just click from one program to the next like you would in Windows or Mac.
You end up jumping your mouse from one side of the screen to the other. Back and forth. Back
and forth. Who designed this? Fortunately, it is really easy to add extensions to tweak behaviour.
Installing Dash to Dock kept the dock visible when I need it. That massively improved the user
experience for me. You can make the entire thing look and behave like Windows without too much
effort but I don't want to emulate Windows. I wanted to try the vanilla GNOME experience... just
not quite so sucky. For me, adding Dash to Dock and switching on the minimize and maximize buttons
took it from a clunky experience to a smooth one. This ease of customisation is a major advantage
of Linux and it regains some points here because although I think the out-of-the-box experience
is a bit clunkier than Windows, by the time you've done just a little bit of tweaking it should be a
better experience than Windows. I don't even think that statement is subjective. At the very least
you can make it behave the same as Windows, so it can't be worse. The real beauty of it
is that you can tweak it to complement your own particular way of working, and no one size
fits all solution is ever going to be as good as that. OK, so using Linux is actually pretty good.
How about performance? There's more good news! My laptop felt noticeably snappier under Fedora than
it had been under Windows 10. It had been starting to struggle and Fedora gave it a new lease of life.
To make things fair I also tested a fresh install of Windows 11 and that did improve things as well
so my old install clearly had a bit of the old Windows rot setting in. I'm therefore not going
to outright say Linux performed better than Windows, but I will allow it to pick up another
point because I do believe it will at least maintain its performance better over time.
Windows just seems to get a bit more bloated over time - a lot of which I put down to its
lack of proper package management. If you want an example, install Visual Studio, then remove it,
and look at how much crud gets left behind because it's not sure if a program might need it or not.
It's why I tend to do clean installs rather than upgrades. The Windows in-place upgrade
process is fairly reliable these days but it's an opportunity to get rid of the junk. Speaking
of package management: Linux dumps on Windows from near-fatal heights here. It's so much better.
It kind of needs to be because with Linux being essentially patched together from hundreds of
independently developed packages if you don't have robust package management in place then you end up
with dependency hell, like I had with my printer. I knew it was better going in. Like I said, I'm
not new to Linux. Using it on the desktop really drives home just how much better it is. On a Linux
server you can tell your package manager to run an update and that's it: everything gets updated. On a
Windows server you tell Windows to run an update and Windows gets updated. You still need to update
the application separately, and maybe it's database too. It's more work than Linux but it's not like
the Windows experience is unusable. Servers tend to be single function machines, though. On the desktop
if you have 30 applications installed in Windows that's probably 30 different update procedures.
Seriously! Patching everything on a Windows desktop is a pain in the backside!
Linux? One command. One single command. The thing is... I installed Microsoft software on Linux.
My goal, remember, is to upgrade my laptop. Not to switch my entire workflow over to open source.
So on Linux I installed Skype because that's what my family uses to talk to their grandchildren, I
installed Visual Studio Code because I'm trying to standardise on that a bit and sync it across devices,
and I installed Microsoft Edge. I know you'll question that! Day-to-day when I'm working there are some
web apps I use that work best in Internet Explorer. I know: it's nearly 2022! I don't want to
switch between multiple web browsers and I don't want to use Internet Explorer so the best way for me to
deal with that is to use Edge; which can open these silly old sites in IE mode and the proper internet
in Chromium mode. Edge makes sense on Windows for that reason; and I've got my settings, my extensions, and
my favourites set up on it. So the easiest thing to do on Linux is install Edge and sync them across.
It turns out the best web browser for me on Linux is Microsoft Edge. Who would have thought that would happen?
The point is, though; on Windows Skype, VS Code, and Edge all have different mechanisms for updating. Rven
though they're some of the better apps and have automatic updates, they're all different! On Linux
it's just "dnf upgrade". One command handles all of them, and the rest of the operating system as well.
Why is Linux better at updating Microsoft apps than Windows is? Seriously! Microsoft! Come on!
So far Linux is looking pretty good. Once you faff about enough to get it working properly
it's slick, performs well, and it's easier to maintain. Now for some problems.
Let's talk about standard office productivity tasks: editing documents, checking my emails...
Microsoft has this whole thing pretty well nailed down, so Linux was always going to struggle by
comparison; but even with that expectation set going in it wasn't a good experience.
I essentially replaced Microsoft Office with LibreOffice and Evolution, and to me it felt like
going about 20 years back in time. A lot of that was the look and feel. LibreOffice and Evolution look
a lot more like Office 2000 or maybe 2003. Looks don't equate to features and for some people
I'm sure they prefer it, but for me it was a step back. I found myself just using webmail instead.
Ordinarily I hate using web apps but OWA versus Evolution when the back-end is Exchange... I
couldn't warm to Evolution. A lot of the issues I had besides the user experience were less about Linux
and more about the fact that I was using Linux in conjunction with Windows. For example, one of
my issues was OneNote. There is no OneNote client for Linux so I was stuck with the web app, which is quite
limited. There are alternative applications, but I have notebooks shared with other people and I
can't just ask them to change their applications because I want to use Linux on my laptop. I tried
using LibreOffice and initially things seemed to go well. I opened a document, edited it, saved it...
then I opened it up again on Windows and the formatting was completely screwed. Again, it seems
unfair to judge LibreOffice on its ability to edit Microsoft Office documents. If I was only using it
for LibreOffice documents I'm sure it would have been fine, but life isn't fair. Most of the rest of
the world uses Microsoft Office so if LibreOffice can't cope with it reliably, LibreOffice really
isn't a lot of use to me. Linux lost a lot of points here because it seriously impeded my daily
tasks. If I was working on Linux in isolation it would have been OK, but that's not the world I
live in. I need compatibility with everybody else and everybody else is using Microsoft Office.
The final problem I had was audio. It just sucked. The sound coming out of my laptop was awful! There
was no bass and no high-end clarity, either. It was like someone had dropped a bandpass filter on
the audio and squeezed all the frequencies. To be clear: my laptop speakers are nothing special.
They're just average little laptop speakers, so I wasn't expecting studio quality audio;
but it was bad! I can't bear to even watch YouTube videos like this, bad. I don't think this is Linux's
fault. If I plugged headphones in it was fine. Linux was generating the right sounds but the onboard
speakers were definitely not right. This seems to be down to an application called Waves MaxxAudio
Pro. In Windows that gets installed automatically along the audio drivers, and if you turn that
off it sounds just as bad. Dell and Waves have collaborated on this to improve the quality of the
audio in this particular device, but there doesn't seem to be any support for Linux. At first I
assumed it was just doing some fancy equalisation so I figured I could tweak it myself, but it's
not that simple. I installed EasyEffects and tried to target the bass first as that was a rather obvious
difference. EasyEffects has a preset for enhancing the bass, but switching it on did absolutely
nothing. I thought EasyEffects wasn't working, but it was. I verified this with a manual EQ.
It worked until it got to about two thousand hertz. Anything I adjusted below two kilohertz had no
effect because it just wasn't being played at all. I dropped every slider above two kilohertz and it
was like I'd hit the mute button: nothing! The meters were jumping around but the speakers were silent.
It seems the MaxxAudio software is operating at the driver level to enable an additional
hardware feature, and without it the frequency range on the onboard speakers gets limited.
Unfortunately it's completely proprietary and there doesn't seem to be any way of working around it.
I tried PipeWire and PulseAudio. I tried different distributions from the Red Hat, Debian, and Arch
families. I tried fiddling around with config files. I tried switching to Ubuntu and pointing
it at the Dell repos that they host for other laptops that they actually do support Ubuntu on,
in case there was a compatible driver floating around in there somewhere; but every combination
I tried had exactly the same issue. At this point I've given up on fixing it, and this is where I
come to my conclusion. Linux is more of a faff to get set up properly, but I expected that. Once set up
the user experience was actually pretty great and it performed at least as good if not better than
Windows. I found the productivity apps to feel dated and there were some serious compatibility
issues with my normal workflow. These compatibility issues and the terrible audio are what ultimately
resulted in me installing Windows 11 instead. At the end of the day if I can't do my day-to-day
tasks or they take considerably longer to do then it's not a viable option for me. So is Linux
on the desktop just to write-off then? No. I was very encouraged to see how far it's come since I
last daily drove it. If I was using almost any other hardware, or if Dell actually bothered to
support their devices on Linux property then the audio issue wouldn't exist. If I was using
a device without proprietary secret sauce and its speakers, and if I wasn't so reliant on Microsoft
Office: this laptop would currently be running Fedora. Would I recommend it to others, though?
If you have or are willing to learn a base level of technical skills to deal with Linux's foibles,
you don't interact with Microsoft Office documents all that often,
and you don't have a laptop the relies on proprietary Windows-only audio software: you should give Linux
a go. It might surprise you! If you or people you work with are deep in the Microsoft ecosystem,
or you just want an easy life: you're better off sticking with Windows. Let me know what you thought
of the video and give it a like if you found it interesting. Have you used Linux on the desktop and
how have you found it? Let me know in the comments! If you want to know about more scenarios where
Linux wins over Microsoft then check out this video, or if you'd like to see our Microsoft wins
over Linux then I've got you covered down here as well. Thanks for watching. See you next time!