HP Dev One Laptop with Pop_OS(hpdevone.com) |
HP Dev One Laptop with Pop_OS(hpdevone.com) |
Super+Enter for terminal. Super+Space for launcher (rofi). Super+C to center window. Super+X to close window. Super+F for file manager. Super+E for editor. I have many others.
I wouldn't use a keyboard without a Super key.
FHD at 14"? That's more than usable sure, but I'd prefer at least 2560x1440, preferably 2560x1600; A 16:9 aspect ratio is a pain in the ass.
4 years ago, these specs (if you can even call it that, we've been given almost no information) would have been decent. Now? This just seems desperate.
EDIT: I know this is quite critical. I like that there is a laptop out there from a traditional OEM, that is being supplied with Pop! OS. I just wish it was a better laptop, because the person looking for a laptop with Pop! OS is more than likely going to be looking for one with decent specs and may have enough additional income to spend on those specs. Other than the 1TB drive (I'm happy with 256GB in a lot of cases thanks to my NAS and streaming), this feels like the bare minimum specs for a laptop in 2022.
For the price, it seems fine, although I'd probably go for the similarly priced Starlabs Starbook Mk V if you were ok w/ FHD: https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook (it has a 5800U)
Or bite the bullet w/ 12th-gen Alder Lake P and go with the latest Framework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31433556
Personally, I'm looking most closely atm at the newly announced (but not yet shipping anywhere) Asus Vivobook S 14X OLED (M5402): https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Vivobook/Vivobook-S-14...
* 45W Ryzen 6900HX (I'll assume RyzenAdj support will come eventually https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj/issues/197)
* 8GB DDR5 soldered, 1 SO-DIMM so up to 40GB of memory
* A ridiculously good display: 14.5" 2880x1800 16:10 120Hz OLED w/ 550nit brightness, 100% DCI-P3, HDR500, Pantone validated (and reportedly no PWM flicker on this generation)
* Decent ports - 1xUSB 2.0, 1xUSB 3.2, 2xUSB C, HDMI 2.0, 3.5mm combo audio jack
* 1.6kg
It hurts battery life, but... this is a developer laptop: make it a bit thicker, and give it as much battery as you legally can.
EDIT: If you're going to down this, please share your disagreement in the comments below; fractional scaling has some good arguments on either side, I'd be interested to hear another perspective.
With 16 GB you can run two whole Electron apps!
And the power button right on the main keyboard. You know, the button you hit multiple times in a day, like delete or backspace.
Get lost.
I hate MacOS. Honestly, I understand the appeal, but can't stand using it. I would literally rather be forced to work in Windows.
If I could buy an M1 with Linux support as great as it's Mac support is, I would in a heartbeat. As it is, I'll be delighted to have options between System76, Framework, Dell, Lenovo, HP.
Actually it looks more like an Elitebook 845. Here's one with similar specs (smaller 512GB SSD) for $1569.
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-elitebook-845-g8-notebo...
Original:
Yes, it looks quite a bit like this one:
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-pavilion-laptop-14-ec10...
Similar specs but with a non-Pro Ryzen 7 CPU and smaller 256GB SSD for $649. Keeping in mind that there's no special sale going on, so this is just the baseline price.
Edit: after signing up for the updates I've found this comment in the bottom of the email: "The content of this email is intended only for U.S. residents". Does this suggest that HP will release this laptop only for the U.S. market?
If so, I wonder where that leaves Pop_OS?
Prioritizing flatiness over the quality and comfort of it is a huge dealbreaker. I'd gladly put more money for more power if I need, but having a decent keyboard is my main requirement.
Which is a shame because otherwise it seems quite good (except for the design which is yet another soulless copy of Apple).
I guess that I'll just stick to Thinkpads until this crazy trend dies.
My personal laptop is a slick Lenovo with a Ryzen 5800H, 16:10 screen and only 16 GB ram. I prefer it much better than my work provided "mobile workstation" that is hot, heavy and loud piece of shit with tons of ram, useless Xeon and a quadro. I know there are people who need this shit but this setup is the norm that barely anyone around here needs
Man, Ryzen 6000 laptops can't come soon enough.
I wish someone would make a laptop that had ECC RAM along with this.
Last I looked there were only some ultra high end Xeon laptops with ECC. :(
Sure.
These days I use an external ThinkPad keyboard on it, since I'm mostly docked at a desk anyway.
The main takeaways I get from this are that HP is now getting on the Linux developer bandwagon, and that they chose Pop!_OS as their distro due to the success and reputation of System76. And I think these are both good things, and a sign that we'll see more of the same with laptop hardware vendors.
If HP also had that license - even a second or a third tier one - they’d have priced it $2989 and make everything not upgradable and announced “Pre-installed Linux for the first time ever in any…… HP laptop” and HN would be filled with comments like “I only have 3GB RAM in my HP laptop and it even lifts my pickup truck. Best ever $3K spent. You don’t need more RAM. If you need then you’re doing it wrong”.
A new M1 Macbook Air starts at $999, and will put that Ryzen to shame. Not to mention infinitely better build quality and battery life. Apple has always been a great value for the price, even if that price is slightly higher than the bargain bin stuff.
People are like we listen to music, have a few docker instances running and we use VScode, we need 32 gb Ram or more.
Why do you need a text editor/ide which consumes so much ram? Is this the reason that apps have gotten more bloated and slow on older devices?
Idk, I'm not a programmer.
I think the price is fair enough, and if the ram isn't soldered (one would be and the other would be upgradable probably)
Had it launched a few months ago, I'd have probably picked it up. Because AFAIK, this seems to be a fairly decent laptop.
I wonder if anyone is tracking the average amount of memory somewhere from 1980-forward. I'd take that value * 2 for a developer.
If you don't work on such code bases then yes 16GB is more than enough and 8GB you can live with on your day to day life.
People who need 32 GB of RAM are where you do mobile development for multiple phones. I don’t think the price can be judged. If the RAm is ddr5 or if the SSD is very fast or how it behaves in real world developer workflows is much more important.
I'll admit, I'm delighted to see HP announce this, if only because it means System76 will (probably) get more funding for Pop_OS and that this may "legitimize" the Linux Desktop more with three major manufacturers carrying supported options.
My main development machine is a simple Ryzen 3 with 8GB RAM, and I run two electron apps (VS Code and Slack) at all times.
A comment in a separate thread here mentioned virtualization. That and gaming would be two legitimate use cases, but for plain-jane development, "8gb ought to be enough for anybody" (har har)
I agree. My only beef is the keyboard:
PLUS: No numpad so trackpad is more less centered (I hate using off-centered trackpads and usually don't care much for the numpad)
MINUS: half-sized arrow keys. As a developer I tend to use those for navigation much more than hjkl, and the half-size arrows get mistyped all the time by my muscle memory.
Not a dealbreaker, though. If I use it often enough the muscle memory will adapt.
The rest of the specs are in line with my expectations for that price-point.
Developers are always going to have very specific wants for laptops and classify anything else as a dealbreaker, which makes sense:
If you're used to one thing that fits your work flow and you use it every day, why would you not stick with the thing that works well for you?
The experience is really good. It is not too polished and not too barebones.
And it is extremely reliable which, in my personal experience, matched by only Linux Mint.
I use an high-end Asus TUF series laptop. And my experience with the laptop + OS is really good.
This will likely be a small volume product and it is almost certainly based on something else in the HP portfolio (advantage of being such a huge OEM), but it’s nice to see a developer marketed laptop in this way. And running a distro other than straight Ubuntu or Red Hat, even.
To me, this indicates that the market research teams at HP have seen the success of Framework and the various Clevo/Sager/Tongfang machines from Tuxedo, System76, XMG, etc. to see this as a viable market worth testing. Obviously, Dell has been doing this for years with the XPS Developer Edition or whatever they call it now, but it is nice to see a product from one of the other big laptop makers.
If OEMs thought ahead, they could have made these changes 10 or 15 years ago, and perhaps have broken through the cost of Microsoft licenses. Instead, they've chosen what seems to be the short-sighted path.
I suspect this low effort goes for the whole product which is a budget laptop with marketing directed at decision makers instead of users.
What really matters for a dev laptop:
- keyboard: standard layout, great feel (like thinkpads 15 years ago; the keyboards have been gotten worse and worse since then)
- screen: resolution (personally I would like more than FHD), aspect ratio, viewing angles, reflectivity, color reproduction
- noise: is the machine completely silent in idle? Is it whisper quiet under heavy load? Does the fan remain off during short (<30s) load spikes?
- ports: How many USB? Ethernet? Thunderbolt for docking?
Also much more interesting than CPU/RAM:
- is the RAM user replacable?
- is the SSD user replacable? Can a second SSD be added?
- battery runtime?
Other than those two nitpicks though this seems like a pretty solid offering. The fact they're only offering POP_OS! on a single laptop is probably both a blessing and a curse - it kinda sucks, but it also means hardware compatibility should be really solid.
Here is the hires from landing page
https://media.graphassets.com/resize=width:3300,height:2805,...
Edit: Legit, © Copyright 2022 HP Development Company, L.P.
But they're advertising an "FHD" screen as though that's a selling feature? That's only 1920x1080 - my Sony Vaio Z laptop from 2010 has the same resolution. People doing any kind of user-facing frontend dev-work pretty-much need a screen capable of 2x/200%/192dpi (i.e. 4K) at least.
...that's a deal-killer for me, as is the lack of a true middle-button on the touchpad.
I'll be sticking with my ThinkPad X1.
Keep in mind your X1 was at least twice the price of this thing (honestly I feel they are overpriced, Asus do literally the same thing for $1k less)
When I got my X1 gen 7 with 4K battery life has become much worse. I have not noticed that I have become a better programmer because the fonts look smoother.
At this point my only reason for booting into Windows will be for games that don’t run on Linux.
I've used it for a couple of years in a Dell Vostro laptop (which was factory-loaded with Ubuntu). Works totally fine.
It has great functionality with no requirement of baby-sitting- just like Linux Mint.
Am I really to believe that relabeling the win key to super is some sort of engineering feat?
I loathe the four left modifier key layout on keyboards which is probably why I hate typing on my Macbook. It would be nice if I could have a fat left control key with the fn key on the right somewhere.
Devs use cursor keys more than anyone and they didn't prioritise a layout you can easily hit with muscle memory. I know because my current laptop has a layout like this machine and it sucks
It sounds funny that this is part of the advertisement.
woah
I don’t think any of these keys are useful enough to warrant taking that space and shifting the whole keyboards to the left. Feels really like a checklist driven design.
I'm constantly touching the pad with the heal of my palm and I'll never buy another laptop with an offset trackpad.
A major company should not be taking "pre-orders". That's for Kickstarters. It's not like making this requires much development. It's basically a standard HP laptop with Linux pre-installed. And you get a special keytop to replace the "Windows" key.
Having 16 GB and 1 TB SSD for about $1000 is pretty good.
I’m not a fan of the arrow keys, Apple made that same mistake.
Given the other specs I’m sure this isn’t possible without raising the price, but I just can’t believe people are still buying brand new laptops in 2022 that have 1080p screens. I mean if it’s a $400 budget model ok I guess.
I suppose I’m more surprised people find that acceptable than that vendors sell it. Do people not know something much better is available?
Ignoring those two complaints/preferences this seems like a pretty decent PC laptop.
Not everyone needs enough ram to simultaneously run a bunch of VMs and train a neural network and edit 4k video all at the same time lol.
(Although 16gb is almost a non starter for Unreal Engine development, and that does run on Linux albeit with some prerequisite yak shaving)
I'm trying to be nice by giving you some honest feedback, assuming you don't realize that it sucks for people to read vapid criticisms without substance.
Edit: Yes, thank you, please downvote me without saying why. Thank you! How deep does the rabbit hole go? It stings and bleeds.. lol :)
The folks at https://reddit.com/r/ergomobilecomputers will thank you.
Of course that's not my normal mode of operation (well, except for the 200 tabs part), but the point is, I'm finally not limited by memory. I don't have to think about it now. I don't find myself always running "top" or "free -h" to try and figure out "OK, do I need to kill some stuff now?" and if so, "what should I kill?" Nope. Any and everything I do in my routine workflow fits in the scope of the hardware. It's incredibly liberating.
"Oh," the critics will say, "RAM that isn't used is wasted." To which I say "so fucking what? It's my RAM and I'll damn well waste it if I want."
And of course you can just order a replacement mainboard for your already purchased Framework laptop, which is awesome.
It kinda reminds me of how some Thinkpad addicts went to crazy lengths to upgrade their 10 year old thinkpads with modern parts lol. Except this time it's official and supported.
That's awesome!
I think this HP is kinda tacky. I don't need a trackpoint and I don't want a keyboard offset to the side like that.
Edit: I meant, you can upgrade it when speccing the laptop. The RAM is probably soldered.
I've been sitting at 27 GB for the past two days with PyCharm open as well.
On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.
I think my example is extremely average and common.
Run a C++ IDE on a medium-large codebase and you can very quickly run out of RAM.
Maybe they're there for nipple users - it has one. Use fingers on the nipple and thumb on the button.
So to speak.
And the laptop is decidedly not a budget laptop rebadge. It looks more like a tweaked EliteBook, their high-end business line. That doesn't automatically make it good, but I think your comment was unfair.
FWIW though, that’s the trackpoint they use on other machines too. They don’t have a 3 button trackpoint like on ThinkPads.
I would expect three-finger middle click emulation (which kinda sucks I agree).
(But there's always been a middle button challenged user population subset around so apps have alternative ways of doing these, a bit like terminal apps can be used without a working meta)
I think it's just worth mentioning in the marketing material because laptop keycaps are generally hard/impossible to swap out individually because they're not really standardized. So it's actually significant that it comes with a non windows logo super key out of the box.
Just one of the little things that all add up to make it feel like Linux is a first class supported thing on it.
I've run not windows on laptops for years, with custom key bindings for the windows key, and not once has it ever bothered me that the symbol on the super key is some funny squares instead of the word super.
It's a really small point so probably not worth dwelling on, and yet, they chose to make it a focus point of their copy. I get try hard vibes.
That said, the location of the power button is unfortunate, I would expect it to be on the corner.
Right Alt/Alt Gr is a different modifier than left alt, though I'd say 90% of my usage is AltGr+4 for the € sign.
It’s a long tail thing I think, but the right/left modifiers pair are tremendously useful if you use it to switch states. For instance I use it for switching IME modes, I could see it used for switching virtual desktops, show/hide virtual environments etc.
It’s more intuitive than using the same key to switch, it works with muscle memory as you’ll always get into a given state by hit a given key.
Why would that be common? I ask because I also don't use the right modifier keys, but that's because I got in the habit years ago on a keyboard which forced me to do it that way.
Right shift when I'm typing with a single hand (for example while phoning or eating). Without it, it would be pretty much impossible to type anything using only one hand, because the rightmost letters are too far away from the left shift key.
The right alt (gr) is very useful to type many languages (especially accentuated) using a US qwerty.
I have right-win set up for this.
Now, I use a custom keyboard, so that I can avoid using my pinky finger as much, and can put the modifiers on the home-row.
Meanwhile you get a Linux distro on a laptop from 20 years ago and either lxde or xfce or whatever and it runs almost like new
OEMs then save the cost of license but open a Pandora box of voiding absolescence
You cannot look at Lenovo sticker price. My conspiracy theory is it exists for the same reason Azure sticker price does: to give procurement managers something to do. My understanding is almost nobody pays sticker on either.
I know with Dell it's just a matter of tracking down an account-executive who can negotiate 10-15% discounts, even for one-off orders, but I haven't been able to do that with Lenovo yet. As for Azure: our spend is well under 6-figures/yr (I think $20k right now?), so we don't have a (named) account-manager yet (we do get personal emails from rotating account-execs once every quarter, but they don't seem keen on saving us money...)
That is not correct. My old HP EliteBook 8560W had not one but two sets of three mouse buttons. See the first image at this article: https://notebooks.com/2011/04/12/hp-elitebook-8560w-details-...
Then again, instead of all the extra wide keys and one extra column of keys to the right of the Enter key, why not two extra columns? Then we can:
1. avoid eating into the space of the Right Shift key
2. have Home/End/PageUp/PageDown in the same layout as in a full size keyboard
3. have Insert in there as oppose to being up on the function key row
4. have the power button in the top right corner instead of the awkward position it is in here, somewhere in the middle
Like I said, nobody gives keyboards one ounce of thought ever.
I don't think it's about copying Apple as much as an industry-wide neglect of keyboard design. Most people don't give the keyboard a lot of weight when making buying decisions, and consequently manufacturers give keyboard designs very little thought.
And it's handy to not ignore the power button. What Apple does is just waiting to trigger the ACPI event unless you press it for half a second or so.
16gb is not enough anymore for even such a modest workload.
Of course when travelling light you might choose to leave extra stuff at home. But how many of us need to travel light to a new location before starting their daily work?
So if you’re stuck at 16GB, that’s unacceptable for a developer laptop in 2022, I don’t care what logo is on the back. 32GB is the only acceptable starting point.
However, those consuming more resources than the share the planet has to offer for everyone are just denying others an equally good life. Either now or in a future generation. https://www.overshootday.org/
Rather useless growth of computer performance might not be the worst problem. But it's easy to address. I can tell you that working with an old 2 GB computer is no problem at all for many tasks with just a bit of thinking. (For sure there are tasks that require more memory. I also use such machines, but not all the time.)
I have a Dell XPS 13 Dev Edition 9370 and tried to replace the Killer brand wifi unit that’s about 80% reliable waking from sleep.
Turns out wifi is soldered in on that edition forward.
I think the same is true for RAM, although it came with 16Gb, which is the mac its processor supports.
Anyone else remember the days of socketed chips that would work themselves loose due to heat?
Putting everything into a single chip is a pain to upgrade but it does mean there’s less chance of things going wrong.
Freedom is value.
I have ported Linux to previous gen macbooks employers insisted I use and it was a mess to maintain.
Also consider your warranty void, so good luck with sanely priced repairs given only Apple can get parts or make repairs in most cases.
Wish Apple came up with lightweight folding/sliding out displays for extra real estate tho.
So I’ll say that expecting 32GB RAM in a $1K laptop is a little too unrealistic.
I was using it to highlight the unreasonable-ness, IMHO of course, of the above request.
I think a better comparison would be Dell or Lenovo who do the same thing HP does, and they too charge a lot for what are essentially OEM versions of Samsung and Hynix memory anyone can get.
More importantly, if companies keep on releasing Linux laptops and only laptops we may really never see the Year of the Linux desktop :(
On MacOS (switched to 2021 MBP 14) basically identical setup is sitting on ~29GB.
I have no idea about Windows, but I don't think anyone would argue that there's much more room on Linux to adjust and optimize for lower RAM usage than on MacOS / Win
I often have to defend Linux because unknowing colleagues blame the OS, when htop shows it's this or that mandated background process.
I laugh at discussions like this. Linux with a slim window manager and vim can run on just about anything and provide a productive programming environment for a codebase of virtually any size provided you can use a remote system for compiles and a slim browser like elinks to access online documentation.
That said my primary workstation runs separate VMs for every application for high security, so I appreciate my 64 cores and 256gb of memory these days.
Of course there were numerous ways to make a 2 GB machine starve if you wanted to or just don't think what is feasible or not and run several crazy Electron apps or worse. Some lightweight containers are not a problem, I have run those.
I remember phones from 20 years ago using something like 150 kB, admittedly they had no real operating system, just a simple task scheduler. Probably color display required a bit more already.
The corporate security software is so awful mine stays at an ambient temperature of around 60°c with the constant background tasks. That can't be good for the hardware.
It’s hard to compare the values of macOS and Linux because they are very different, but it’s still easy to say that an M1 has excellent uses on macOS and everyone interested in non-Apple machines is (to some degree) waiting to see what Qualcomm or Nvidia can come up with in the ARM chipset space for non-macOS laptops… I think ChromeOS laptops prove that iPad-like performance is possible, but so far only the Apple M1 has shown that traditional x64-like performance is possible on laptop/desktop from ARM chips.
This looks like their current generation Pro/EliteBook lines. I have one of the higher end ones (EB 845) and oh boy does the screen suck. Not just compared to my 9 yo MBP. But even on its own. Very low angles, washed out colors. It's only advertised as 72% NTSC IIRC. Cheaper models have 6-bit panels on which you can see the dithering in the window shadows. It's laughably bad. And it cost more than similarly-specced MacBook Air.
Other than that it's a usable PC, plenty fast for my needs, and the RAM and SSD are easily upgradeable. Battery life is OK-ish (I get around 6 hours).
Also, everything works under Linux and is even less of a hassle to get going than on Windows (you need an external mouse to install it).
FWIW, ThunderX will sell you a 96 core arm64 desktop that definitely offers x64-like performance. And Ampere will sell you a 256 core arm64 2U server node that matches the performance of the fastest AMD Epyc Milan CPUs. AFAIK there is no desktop case that supports the motherboard of the latter, but there is no reason why you couldn't make one.
These things are a bit niche, since the main benefit of arm64 is the reduced power demand at a given performance level, which desktop/workstation users seldom care much about. In the data center though they are killing it, I believe Azure is using the Ampere Altra stuff for their Graviton2-competitor.
If you want to match those specs it jumps up to $1,649 which is $550 more than the HP.
Is the Mac better though? Of course it is, but not everyone needs the latest and greatest and not everyone needs to pay $550 more for it.
From the benchmarks I’ve seen the M1 chips swap so fast that the penalty for less RAM is much less that I would expect on an Intel based laptop.
I’m pretty sure that if I was to move back to a mac right now I’d get 16Gb over 32Gb because there just isn’t much advantage to doubling the RAM.
I mean there’s a bit but to honest I don’t think I’d notice day to day.
Then again, if you get to run Linux on the M1 some day, this might be slightly different.
With the M1 dominance (and inflation) there’s basically no premium at this point (although there is little to no low-end options).
SSD is very annoying, though.
For that Macbook Air, it is still a good deal but I'd wait for an M2 version. As for that HP laptop, no thanks and no deal from me.
I’ve never had anything break on a laptop[1] I’ve owned regardless of brand since 2005.
I can’t be that atypical.
1. Apart from maybe the wifi on my XPS13 which I can just about live with by turning wifi on and off.
If they are made with discrete components and still can't be repaired then you'd loose nothing by going to a higher level of integration.
This looks like it could be a compelling choice for my next laptop but will have to pass if it's not possible to go to 32gb
not really, you can just leave a leaky or script-laden page open for awhile to see the same behavior, depending on how things are put together.
example: blue iris is a cctv package that has a webui module. That web-ui client-side browser tab will inflate to system-memory size if allowed within a few days.
Not much of a point other than there are other (probably pretty esoteric) things that one can do to a browser that'll make them fall apart even on modern hardware.
I’m pretty sure 16gb machines have been the baseline for developers everywhere I’ve worked for the past decade.
When running Linux, you do not incur the VM overhead for containers (Docker) that you do on Mac or Windows. This allows for isolated production like environments, without carving out multi GB chunks of RAM. Additionally, if you are targeting Linux for production, you often don't even need to containerize, unless you need to run three different versions of node/python/ruby or something else that is just library conflicts all over the place.
> I’m pretty sure 16gb machines have been the baseline for developers everywhere I’ve worked for the past decade.
My 2012 daily driver was a well spec'd HP, and it had 8GB of RAM. It did not support more - I tried and had to take the RAM back because the machine would only address 8GB. A look at Macbook specs in 2012: 4GB or 8GB models. I think the 16GB becoming the norm was a few years later.
By default a Java app will set its max heap size to 25% of RAM (Java 11 and above). While it may not use all of that, it’s likely to. So, by default, running two Java apps on Java 11 on 8GB of RAM has the likely potential of eating 4GB RAM. Then there’s the OS needs, browser needs, etc.
Clearly 8GB isn’t enough for such a developer. I’ve had this discussion countless times with people over the past two decades. It always ends the same — with people from both sides of the discussion shaking their heads.
The only claim that I feel anyone can make, given enough experience, is that RAM needs vary. So making a claim that N amount of RAM is enough for many or most will always be patently wrong in my view.
Running multiple OS' is always demanding. They could fix it by just using Linux for the dev environment in the first place since all their tools are always electron or Java based.
Perhaps it's a windows thing?
I want 64 GB but I will say for my current needs, 32 GB is the sweet spot. My normal daily use is around 20GB. And it is a MacBook Pro. One day I’ll probably go back to a laptop running Linux. It is the fastest for code compilation in my experience.
But it's not just memory, I find running code on MacOS generates a lot more heat causing the CPU to spike and harder to run in the first place.