Have we finally reached the point where an everyday consumer could adopt and use Linux day to day? By way of trying to resurrect a nearly-defunct laptop, I tried to find out.
Many, many years ago, I started working as a technology journalist.
Prior to that, I’d been a support technician for a now-defunct computer company – a job that gave me some astonishingly weird anecdotes but also something of a fear of answering the telephone, because NOBODY calls tech support when they’re happy – as well as variously an audiology test monkey, a receptionist for an interesting builder and before then, that cliché of clichés, an unemployed Arts graduate.
I started as a tech journalist right when Windows 98 hit, to give some context, but right about that time, there was also a significant groundswell around an alternative to Microsoft.
No, it wasn’t Apple.
Honestly, at that time Apple was seen as something of a basket case, and while it absolutely had its fans, this was in the period where it was built around the PowerPC architecture with some odd case designs but a diminishing market share. Sure, the G4 Cube was cute – I reviewed that thing back in the day – but I digress.
No, the “competitor” in this case was Linux. Ask the Linux faithful at the time (and to an extent, still to this day), and Linux was going to crush whatever was left of Microsoft after the US Department of Justice had eviscerated them…
Yeah, that didn’t happen either.
Still, for the publication I worked for, there was reader interest in Linux, and that meant that it got written about; even had some rather successful spin-off one-shot magazines (if you remember the term “Pocketbook”, you know what I’m talking about). Linux was the next big thing, and the catch cry that it was shortly going to be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop, because it was inevitable that Linux would overtake Windows in consumer and business market share on the desktops that everyone used at the time.
In full honesty, I wasn’t one of the Linux writers at that stage of my career. Not that I wasn’t curious, but it wasn’t what I was dealing with at the time, which was roughly 95% hardware, 5% software – and most of that software was typically more in the games and entertainment arena.
Still, I was curious, and I got to chatting to the editor of the Linux Pocketbooks (Hi Ashton, if you’re reading this!) about where Linux was at.
He was quite keen – always a good way to be if you’re trying to write to and for a passionate and/or interested audience – and suggested I give Linux a try.
So I did. There was a spare desktop around, I had some time to spare to set it up while other tests ran, so I grabbed a Linux distribution – from memory it was Red Hat Linux, because that was very much the style at the time, but I could be wrong, this was a long time ago – and set to installing it.
It… didn’t go well.
To be fair, this was a quarter of a century ago and there was a lot of work to do with Linux, but even after struggling through a lot of command line work to try to get subsystems like audio and mouse control working… I gave up.
I could 100% see the potential, but the reality was that in order to get a reasonably functional system up and running, I would have to spend a LOT of time to perhaps make it work. Or maybe I’d be amongst the hardware configurations where no drivers existed, at which point I would have perhaps been free to try to write my own… but there was more pressing business at hand, so, honestly, I gave up. 1999 was, for me, not the year of Linux on the desktop, but I did try.
Fast forward a number of (gulp) decades, and I found myself reviewing the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip Laptop.
Not a Linux desktop by any stretch of the imagination, but then the world has moved on to an extent from desktops to a more laptop-focused approach.
Desktops still have their place, but it’s secondary to laptops, though I doubt too many people are talking about “The year of Linux on the laptop”. I’m sure it’s been done, mind you… but not likely to the same extent.
In any case, one of the first queries I had about from a viewer of my YouTube review was around whether or not it could run Linux.
I do try to be an obliging sort, so I did try to get it quickly up and running… and I failed, largely because I hit a UEFI security barrier that I didn’t entirely have the time to work my way past. I apologised to the viewer but I had to move on…
But that thought stayed with me, and over time, I tinkered, worked my way around the problem, and was able to boot that laptop to Linux from a USB drive. Sometimes an idea gets into my head and just refuses to leave, even if there’s not much reason to follow it through… but once again, I digress.
I updated my note to that viewer that it was feasible, and got on with my life. The HP could run it, but I didn’t have a pressing Linux need in my life to go down that route immediately.
Fast forward a few more months, and I had to replace the laptop for one of my offspring, because, well, it had seen better days. This left me with a mostly-or-at-least-seemingly-knackered laptop that would still power up into Windows 11, but really wasn’t happy running there.
So my mind turned to the potential solution of making lemonade out of this potential lemon, by way of Linux. There are plenty of lightweight distributions around… but how easy would it be to make this actually happen?
Meet the test system… or possibly test victim
Device: Lenovo Yoga 310-11IAP
Processor: Intel Celeron N3350
RAM: 4GB
Storage: 64GB MMC
Display: 11.6 inch touch display 1366×768 pixels
This was, it’s fair to say… not an impressive machine even when it was brand new.
Based on the sticker on its base, it was manufactured on the 18/03/2017, so it’s also not all that young.
It was, at the time, a relatively low cost replacement for a broken laptop for a high school student, with a focus on affordability above all. It was never fast, but time, and being absolutely thumped around in a secondary school environment had not been kind to it.
Something has scratched the hell out of this laptop. Or possibly chewed on it, it’s hard to tell.
The exterior casing looks like it’s been got at by a werewolf, and on the inside it’s got a lot of wear and tear, especially around the touchpad, which resolutely refuses to recognise any clicks, though I can use it to move the mouse cursor around in Windows 11. The left hand mouse clicking area has a nasty crunch sound to it, so I’m not hopeful here.
This is even uglier than it looks. And it sounds even worse.
It’s only because it supports touchscreen commands that I can “use” it at all… and even then, only just.
Time to see if I can cram as much penguiny goodness as Linux can provide onto it, because honestly, it cannot make it worse as long as it doesn’t set it on fire.
If there’s a Linux command for setting something on fire, I don’t want to know what it is.
Early Ubuntu attempts meet with frustration
First step was getting Linux onto a USB drive. I’m not writing this as a tutorial – there are plenty of those online – so I’m not going to cover each and every step in the process, to be clear.
I decided to dive in the deep end with one of the bigger players in the space by way of Ubuntu, flashing up a USB drive with Balena Etcher on a MacBook and setting to installing.
The one benefit here of having dived and ducked my way around security and boot issues on the HP was that I was much more prepared to deal with the changes needed to boot security and order on the Lenovo, so this was a fairly trivial step.
Pleasingly, so was the actual install process for the most part. Most Linux USB installs allow you to try-before-you-buy by running from USB, but for this system I didn’t want to do that. Partly because I did want to go all in because it did feel like this laptop had nothing to lose, but also because I was aware I was dealing with a limited system to start with. Adding in the slow speed of USB transfers for everything was not going to help in any way at all.
Still, I was impressed; having gone through way too many Windows installs in my time, this was no worse, if a little slower, but then it’s hard to say if that was down to the slowness of the system, the legacy USB interface and drive issues, or the headroom needed by Ubuntu Linux itself. Probably a mix of all three.
Ubuntu did… run, but that’s the wrong word to use here.
This is more like how it ran.
It did recognise most of the hardware, and even pleasingly wanted to work a little better with the touchpad and what was left of its clicking ability than Windows was, but it was glacially slow. Everything was, from network speeds to the speed at which applications would launch.
I did somewhat expect this; I’d deliberately chosen Ubuntu as my Windows-equivalent; a full-fat Linux to see if the experience was better or worse than Windows first off.
I’ll call that a tie; Ubuntu felt a little less responsive, and the network speeds over Wi-Fi weren’t great, but it seemed to do a slightly better job with the underlying hardware.
So I then set out to find a lighter weight Linux to actually run on the Yoga 310 instead.
This was where I did hit a notable issue that nearly derailed me, but then, I’m a stubborn type.
Specifically, a number of the lighter Linux distributions I tried would install, and I could set them to be the only OS on the Yoga 310, but then they’d hit an issue that (as far as I can tell) with trying to finalise the Grub installation to the MMC drive that it has within its frame.
I could reboot to a command line that was far more DOS than it was GUI, if you follow me, and this wasn’t what I wanted.
I tried a few different distros just to see if I could brute force my way past this problem before trying Linux Mint, and specifically Linux Min Xfce Edition, its lightweight variant.
Did it solve my booting/installing problem?
No.
But at that stage I got cranky enough to dive deeper, working out that what I (ultimately) needed to do was have the installation run, fail, but not then to reboot when it suggested I should do so, instead installing Boot Repair from the command line, then rebooting from the Linux Mint USB drive I’d flashed and “repairing” a system that I’d not yet been able to boot into.
And this… worked!
(Here’s the video, by the way that helped me sort this out. It’s for an Ubuntu distribution, but the essential steps presented here worked for me, so maybe they’ll work for you too).
That being done, I could reboot and see how well it all worked.
The short form (because this has already run way longer than I intended for what was meant to be a silly little side project) is that it does indeed function.
I recognise this web site!
This article you’re reading was written on the Yoga 310 on LibreOffice, something I would not have had the patience to fight through doing on it when it was struggling with Windows 11.
Images were worked on via The Gimp, transferred from a smartphone running KDE Connect.
This part of my job I could theoretically do on this platform, though I suspect any kind of video editing would be beyond it — but then that’s a function of the underlying hardware and its limitations, too.
It works – though it should be clarified that this is far from a quick laptop system, because it never really was.
The physical issues it had are still present, with some instability from the touchpad and a few keyboard keys that have clearly been thumped more than others, but I can’t blame either open source software or Microsoft for that.
So is Linux ready for prime time?
Are we finally at… deep breath… the year of Linux on the desktop?
Yes… and no.
In one sense we’re already there and have been for some time.
While it’s heavily modified, Chromebooks (and I’ve reviewed a few over the years) are running on a Linux core, as is hardware like the Steam Deck, which has done a lot to improve the way Linux works with gaming all by itself. No, I’m not trying to run heavy duty games on the Yoga 310, because that would be futile, but the point here is that a lot of this consumer-facing work is already done, albeit in a way where most of those users don’t really think about it being “Linux” at all.
As for converting old, nearly-worn out hardware to give it a new lease on life?
It’s certainly feasible, but not without its pitfalls.
A less patient (or possibly less pig-headed) person than myself might have given up at the point where I had to mess with UEFI settings just to boot from a USB drive, or to fix up booting issues due to (as far as I can tell, happy to be corrected here) the nature of the storage this laptop uses.
Most functions work, but I’m still stuck with laptop Wi-Fi speeds that are about 20% of what they should be – if anyone’s got any ideas there, leave a comment below – and for some regular consumers, that’s going to be a big and rather steep learning curve.
A lot of Linux fixes are still bolted in at the Terminal code level, and that’s still a big barrier when and if things go wrong, because for everyday consumers, that kind of coding is SCARY, and annoyingly, much of what’s out there in help files is still dusted in a layer of jargon that many will find absolutely impossible to understand. There are help files out there, but there are also still some responses that are less than polite, shall we say, to the less code-savvy users.
But could I use this laptop I’m writing on now for day-to-day work?
It’s entirely feasible, also thanks to the fact that so many applications are now web apps; if I can live with my lower network speeds (or optimally, solve them) then there’s plenty of scope for this to be a productive little machine.
I suspect for now, it’ll become my sitting-on-the-deck-in-the-sunshine writing machine from time to time, but if you’ve got any other ideas on what I could use it for, let me know below!
This was a side project, to be clear, but it’s also part of what I do here at ART — and I can’t afford to do so without your support. If this was useful to you (or just entertaining as a long read), then why not help keep independent ethical media alive by dropping a dollar or two in the tip jar below?
[kofi]
About the Author
I could see myself as perfectly happy with Chromebooks if, instead of or even in addition to Crostini, Google had seen fit to preinstall a Linux software manager application for FlatPaks. Imagine if Chromebooks came with KDE Discover or GNOME Software. Nirvana.