Linux Laptop – HP Dev One Is Available | Hacker News Reader

Linux Laptop – HP Dev One Is Available

hpdevone.com

39 pointsauraham59 comments

HP Dev One Laptop with Pop_OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31453125 - May 2022 (345 comments)

Happy to see some AMD laptop but please:

- 14" diagonal FHD LED UWWA for HD Webcam (1920x1080) (1000 Nits)⁹

FHD is dead to me, I want pixels please. It's SO hard to find a laptop with a good 2k/4k screen. As a dev I want a lot of screen space.

- 720p HD camera

Seriously ?

I know it's a $1,099, but if your target is developers, they want better spec, the price is not really the issue. If I spend my life on a laptop, it better be a really good one.

A modestly good 720p camera wpuld beat the pants off 98% of 1080p cameras.

I have some various logitech webcams. They do... ok 1080p. But it's still fuzzy & blurry. Best camera in the work zoom but still seems comedic that it's called 1080p given how smeared & unsharp things are. Takes more effort but I can also plug-in/set-up & pull 1080p (or 4k30) off a fancier zcam e1 + elgato hdmi adapter. Those pixels all count, they really each are carrying their own weight. In my estimation very few cameras really carry 720p weight.

A good 720p camera, especially one that can adapt to various lighting situations, would be fantastic. Alas, we have very very few reviewers out there who can give us a decent review on webcams. We'ee fated to suffer shit equipmemt with only superficial & often detrimemtal competition ("only 720p?!") when we lack methodical & scientific reviews. To progress requires some real figures of merit, & pixel count often hurts more than helps explain.

There's ~6 laptops with >800nit brightness displays. Great to see such a strong showing here at a very reasonable price. Yes I could use more pixels but I can also run font size 8 or 9 terminals just fine & it wont affect me. Honestly for a vast amount of the time I'll be plugged in anyways.

Don know about specific camera for this, but most built-in webcams horribly underperform, Macbooks included.

Manufacturers need to produce laptops with 4k display if they are willing to compete with Macs... And also a decent touch pad and battery.

I really don't care about 4k on a small screen.

I thought I didn't too, but after using Macs due to work, i couldn't stand it and returned my laptop and got 4k

I'd be more interested in a 16:10 aspect ration, ideally at 1920x1200

Maybe not 4k, but 1080p is miserable.

How close are you sitting to your laptop? I usually use 15.6" 1080p from about 60cm away and can't tell a difference from a higher resolution. If you search "retina distance calculator" then they say there's no benefit from higher resolution at that distance or greater. And even if you can perceive it as being slightly sharper, "miserable" definitely seems like a stretch.

I can tell the difference, that's why I returned my previous laptop and got 4k. I also like my screen text small, so more fits.

I'm specifically buying 1080 or 1440p to save battery. Also on 14" I can barely see any difference. I'd maybe go with 4k on 17".

I am nearly always plugged in, so i stopped optimizing for it but it's great to have for sure. Macs do great here, great display, great battery in general. My personal laptop is a gigabyte aero 4k and battery doesn't last quite as long.

I've gone there and further. Specifically, most of the time I'm plugged in, so I've got external screens and the built in one doesn't matter. On the other hand, the only time I don't have them, the battery matters just as much.

PopOS 22 bricked my touchpad (System76). Other people have posted about the same issue and no fix is here.

Minus the touchpad, great laptop. I just use an external mouse but I prefer a working touchpad.

With MacBooks, i can work with touchpad fairly well... Every other touchpad i used on Linux machines make me hate them. They are not high quality metal-ish touchpads so they wear off and so on.

I've been using the same ZBook 15 since 2014. The touchpad didn't wear off. I'm using it only to move the pointer and scroll, no click (there are hardware buttons) and no gestures. Maybe that increases the lifespan of the touchpad or it's just a good one.

Likely a good one. Most of my wearoffs happened due to scrolling or just normal pointer movements.

I had a similar touchpad situation, i forgot if me replacing the laptop for something else or new version of pop fixed it...

It's ironic, because Macs somewhat crappily upscale a lot of onscreen content & dont run at native resolution. I hope there's less jank better options but SwitchX Pro or whatever is what I use to coerce my macbook into running native res. People will drop what they are doing & walk over to me & exclaim: "you can read that?!?!". It's 2880x1800, not even that high density. But it's indeed tiny. I somewhat jokingly answer the trick is to already know whats on the screen.

So yes, more would be nice, in my book, but hardly required, and most of the evidence I see is of people unable to use anything better than 1080p.

Do you have any particular reason to be trashing on the trackpad or is this just more general pissery?

I have gigabyte aero 4k display. i love the display, i almost hate everything else - the touchpad, the ports, the charger, the wobbliness of the screen hinge. Only bought it for display and it don't regret it.

As for touchpad, it wasn't a particular piss at this machine but general situation for nonmacs. I am not a Mac fanboy, i love my Linux laptop but nearly everything i tried had some weirdness about them. Some wears off really fast, some are not as responsive (may be a software driver issue, which i have had problems with pop before but not recently). Macs have had consistently performed great.

> Manufacturers need to produce laptops with 4k display if they are willing to compete with Macs... And also a decent touch pad...

For a dev machine, manufacturers aren't competing with Macs.

I've got a macbook right here next to me:

No function keys No pageup/pagedown/home/end/insert[1] keys Poor and crappy support for my USB keyboard (which does have all those missing keys).

At least the macbook has an inverted T set of arrows keys, even if they are half-size.

[1] I use shift-insert all the time.

I can highly recommend to override the keyboard layout so that you can press CAPS-LOCK + <some letter> for arrow keys

> I can highly recommend to override the keyboard layout so that you can press CAPS-LOCK + <some letter> for arrow keys

It's easier to simply buy a machine with a better keyboard than to memorise a whole new set of keychords that I won't be using anywhere else.

There's a lot of nice laptops out there with decent keyboard layouts, even in the 14" range.

A lot of employees of big corp disagrees with you, sadly. Some don't even get the option.

While at Google, i used to get Lenovo first few times, but switched to MacBook for battery and display.

Screen actually makes a huge difference...

I welcome this machine but why a Linux laptop with hardware mouse buttons and only two of them instead of three? Simulating a middle key (paste) by pressing both together was never good in my experience. I only buy laptops with three buttons because of that.

I've had luck with pretty much any hardware running latest kernel on Arch. I'm not sure having a vendor sell an overpriced Linux laptop is really necessary anymore, unless you want vendor support. Note, that HP notoriously includes spyware in their drivers and firmware.

At first I thought it looked great, but then I noticed two very odd things:

1) The trackpad is not centered? Why would you ever do this? This is specifically the reason I always buy laptops without numpads so that the trackpad will be centered. There was no obvious reason not to center the trackpad on this machine.

2) A 720p webcam?? Really?? You are going to brag about that? I guess at least it's at the top of the device instead of buried in the bottom left corner like on some generations of Dell XPS.

Looks like it's centered with respect to the home row. My Dell work laptop actually has that same layout, I've never noticed that.

Yeah - agreed on 1, I disqualify it on that alone.

Apple sets a high bar, but this doesn’t even clear a low one. Who would ship that? Does nobody else have any taste?

More things that I don't like than things I do like.

- A taller display would have been better. 1080p is great for media, but a laptop that literally has "dev" in its name could use a taller display, specially at 14".

- Having used HP laptop keyboards, those squashed up/down arrow keys are not so good. Just for with the T layout.

- 720p webcam in 2022.

- Bigger battery would be better. Even gaming laptops pack 60 Wh batteries.

- could use a fingerprint reader too.

That said, it has upgradeable RAM, which had me worried when they first announced.

I definitely don't get the appeal, looks like someone just factory install a linux distro and call it a day. If I am needing a dev machine, why not just get a thinkpad and snap my favorite linux distro on it?

It's a marketing thing. HP zbook series laptops have been documented Ubuntu-compatible for ~a decade now.

Looks like a rebadge of HP ZBook Firefly 14 G8, except there is no AMD variant to that model so mainboard must be new.

Edit: from previous discussion, EliteBook 845 G8 uses identical chassis with AMD processor but without pointing stick. So maybe a hybrid of these(ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31453748 ).

only two buttons on the pointing device :-(

Yeah, that whole keyboard and trackpad setup feels like no real thought was put in to it to make it a "developer" machine.

* Arrow keys not inverted-T

* No physical trackpad click buttons below the pad

* No middle-click button for the trackpoint

* F1-F12 keys not in groups of four

* Weird column of home/pgup/pgdn/end buttons

* Power button as a keyboard key directly above the backspace

* No Fn-tenkey

Just another macbook clone. Sigh.

Two rows of mouse buttons would probably take too much space on a machine of that size but I should compare it with my ZBook (which has the same arrows keys and have been OK for me since 2014.) However the power button is really dangerous and the off center touchpad is a little off putting. Is this Lenovo keyboard patented?

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/accessories-and-software/keyb...

Yeah, that Lenovo keyboard is miles better. My main complaint with it is the Fn key being bottom-left instead of the control key. Thankfully, they have a BIOS setting to swap them.

dunno what you mean about two rows of mouse buttons but the keyboard (wired version, never wireless) you linked to is the best option if a trackpoint is needed on a desktop. I've been using it (or previous iterations) for five+ years and hoping that Lenovo don't cancel them out of the blue.

I mean this https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/hp-zbook-15-mobile-work...

And more: I didn't realize that is a standalone keyboard. If I'll ever use a desktop I want a keyboard like that but with a touchpad below the mouse keys.

It looks like really nice hardware. Two sodimms. Bright display. Personally I love love love having a nub pointer. If a workplace gave me an option, I'd pick this in under a heartbeat over the traditional Macbook. Especially given that the modern Macbook can't fruggin run linux, like a frump.

Interesting. Personally, I was thinking what "Dev" would be okay with only Full HD (on a 14" Laptop) in 2022.

Edit: I should have been more clear, I am not confused about the estate (which seems fine for 14") but about the lack of higher DPI.

Many or even most. I find that HN is really not representative in this matter.

In your mind, what is the unique selling point of this device? Who buys it over everything else out there and for what reason?

Good build, brightness, battery life, expandable, & supported by the best & only kernel worth a damned, at a very reasonable price.

If i had stupid amounts of money there's a lot of really really nice laptops. X1 carbon or a zbook or firefly or whatever. But this ticks most of the boxes, does a damned fine job, & costs a reasonable amount. And it runs a real os.

I would be tempted by the 1000 nits display and the weight. I'm OK with 1080p but I'd like 16:10 or 3:2. Unfortunately it's only 14" and only two mouse buttons. 15", 3 buttons and no numberpad and I'd consider it as a replacement for my ZBook from 2014 when it will die. Hopefully there will be time for some new generations and variants of this product and hopefully HP is reading these threads.

I usually keep chat or email on the laptop screen (just fine for that resolution and screen size), then connect a couple more with a lot more real estate and do my coding on those.

I was more thinking along the lines of high DPI than estate. You don't care about that?

Haven't ever paid much attention to DPI, no.

You'll find devs who would be okay with a 720p screen just because "muh battery life".

Sure, I mean, go ahead with that but at least provide an option for others who need a highdpi 2x integer scaled display. I refuse to use a laptop without a highdpi screen.

I usually would be plugged into a 4k120p display on a nice monitor arm.

On the go, I'd have a good small font that works for me & be using sway to economize screen-space.

That I can use a relatively compact computer, for a long time, outdoors has a bigger impact on me. I dont know how this unit's 1000nits compares to MBP but it's definitely better than 99% of the market & this would totally work for me. Yes I would like like more res. But I also would make this work & appreciate the battery gains & want the brightness & good colors.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/243/

> Available for purchase in the U.S. only

Whoops

Sorry, 1000 nit display? Really? That's sunlight-readable, right?

Probably a typo? My desktop monitor is 500 nits and at full brightness it makes your face sweat.

Ahahah what a hilarious way to say it :D

MBP claims 1000nits fullscreen brightness. HP already has a bunch of laptops that do 800+. This to me is one of the best & easiest ways for this laptop to win. A beefy Ryzen is available on dozens & dozens of laptops now, cheap. Having a really versatile display is a killer upgrade. I live in the console: font size 8 or 9 gets me the high density content, while being at a power conserving 1080p. But being able to see that display clearly in all conditions: that governs what font size Ill be able to effectively use. Great move, sensible, not even costly. Most people just charge way more because they think they can.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com