Actually most laptops (or desktops) can't compete with USB sound cards. Because the audio chips that come on your motherboard:
* are usually cheaper and lower quality;
* often have limited kernel/ALSA driver support (which is why the alsa-driver bug backlog is always out of control);
* often suffer from noise on the headset jack from the digital-to-analog stage being too close to the rest of the computer.
So I strongly recommend USB audio in general. Especially for wired headsets where you can also avoid the lossy nature of Bluetooth audio encoding.
And for Bluetooth audio, such a USB dongle sounds like a great workaround for this bug. But we all wish it wasn't necessary.
Actually most laptops (or desktops) can't compete with USB sound cards. Because the audio chips that come on your motherboard:
* are usually cheaper and lower quality;
* often have limited kernel/ALSA driver support (which is why the alsa-driver bug backlog is always out of control);
* often suffer from noise on the headset jack from the digital-to-analog stage being too close to the rest of the computer.
So I strongly recommend USB audio in general. Especially for wired headsets where you can also avoid the lossy nature of Bluetooth audio encoding.
And for Bluetooth audio, such a USB dongle sounds like a great workaround for this bug. But we all wish it wasn't necessary.