HP’s Linux-based AMD laptop releases, starts at $1,099
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Neither does this. What it has is an annoying column of keys to the right of the shift and Enter keys, which are a surefire way to make it so you hit them by accident all the damned time.
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Libreoffice (writer and calc at least) is great if your whole organization has adopted it, as you have much reduced compatibility issues. Also lovely if you have Nextcloud as your cloud service. But for freelancers/consultants it does add extra effort as most of your clients will be MS Office and you really need to go to them. Where LibreOffice really fails is Impress (I.e. PowerPoint). Its just horrible in my opinion.
On the laptop, what does System76 get out of this? Wider exposure in the hopes it drives customers to them? A share of sales? It is interesting as you'd think this would eat into their own product line. I didn't understand the supply chain thing. Is there some sort of component purchasing deal?
On the laptop, what does System76 get out of this? Wider exposure in the hopes it drives customers to them? A share of sales? It is interesting as you'd think this would eat into their own product line. I didn't understand the supply chain thing. Is there some sort of component purchasing deal?
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Sorry, I didn’t realise that forgetting the /s tag would be so catastrophic. Lesson learned!
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Well, Big Tech(tm) is constantly trying to tell me what I need and replacing all my perpetually licensed software with subscriptions and getting rid of my beloved menu bar!
(Apologies, I thought the /s was obvious in my original post. I myself have struggled for a good alternative to Office in Linux, and whilst LibreOffice is great for me, it only gets me about 80pc of the way there )
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Well it’s open source so you should just fork it and create the last 20% and call it PubliusOffice. Case closed.
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If they made a similar sized ThinkPad T or P series that had 2 SODIMM slots so I could have 64GB of memory I would have. But they don't. At least not 1 year ago when I was looking to buy. If only this had been around I'd have bought it immediately. Hm. Might anyway, looks like it has a track point.
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The lack of a center trackpoint mouse button is a strange omission though.
I am getting to have a bit of a collection of big ol Thinkpads around here, and consider myself to be quite the snob in my niche. For this particular product, I would be most concerned about all the physical properties. Are those buttons particularly usable, is the keyboard OK? I've never tried an HP version of those controls. The buttons look very flat to me, IMO they should dip down towards the keyboard, with as much height as they can manage. I would be concerned if they were good to use. (Shape, plus the lack of the center button.)
Of course Lenovo has been very consistent about reducing the depth of all their controls, flatter and flatter with every generation for as long as they have owned the Thinkpad name. Its pretty strange go switch between them, because especially the chicklet keyboards look alike at a glance, but feel different.
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Yes, that's what I'm thinking every day when using a similar keyboard for SW development on the EliteBook 840 Aero.
The keyboard on my HP laptop is rubbish. The keys are shifted a bit, to have the extra column with Home, End etc, so I constantly hit the wrong keys. Like hitting Pgup instead of Enter (or in the middle). The arrow keys have been designed to look at.. not for navigating around in code. And at least the keys on my HP are way to stiff to be comfortable to use. I hate this keyboard. But on a laptop you can't just buy a new one (unless you use it as a desktop with an external monitor) .
The XPS13 I had before had a much much better keyboard and also all the Asus that I have at home have varying degrees of better keyboards than the current HP I'm stuck with all day.
Edit: spelling.. this keybard is hard to use
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I use popos, decided to move from trouble free Mint a few months ago. It's not great, but I'm giving it time. As a developer I'm happy enough but would never use it as an OS for my family. But this is dev oriented and a dev could easily swap out OS if they wanted.
The pop app installer crashes a lot and refuses to upgrade and probably more down to the the underlying software, and requires a lot of help fixing in most cases.
A few times I've lost the entire boot for no reason. Fixing those are fun.
My biggest gripe is the desktop, you can't drag files or create shortcuts easily, you have to create config files first for half the things you want to put there. Trying to figure out how to put shortcuts on the task bar requires a degree in computer science.
If you're a developer or somewhat technical then it's ok, but it's not the Linux people have been looking for as the Windows killer.
The pop app installer crashes a lot and refuses to upgrade and probably more down to the the underlying software, and requires a lot of help fixing in most cases.
A few times I've lost the entire boot for no reason. Fixing those are fun.
My biggest gripe is the desktop, you can't drag files or create shortcuts easily, you have to create config files first for half the things you want to put there. Trying to figure out how to put shortcuts on the task bar requires a degree in computer science.
If you're a developer or somewhat technical then it's ok, but it's not the Linux people have been looking for as the Windows killer.
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I wish there was more information on keyboard preferences out there. The reviews always seem to give an easy pass to whatever comes through. Myself, I think they have been making the Thinkpad keyboards worse in 2-3 year steps, but perhaps I have a minority opinion. When I go to the local shop and push some keys, I just hate basically everything they have on display, terrible thin little short-travel keys. Maybe some people like those?
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I wonder what the difference is between PopOS and Ubuntu that attracted HP? It's a downstream distro, so you're basically getting the same thing. Maybe System76's support is better?
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I don't know about other trackpoint users but to me including a trackpoint without a third middle click button (new tabs, X/Y scrolling) is pointless. Either you include it in full (with 3 mechanical buttons) or you don't include it altogether.
I don't get how 2 buttons trackpoints (which seems to be a HP special) can pass any professional QA test in the field. Even my 20+ years old very first Thinkpad had three buttons with its trackpoint!
I don't get how 2 buttons trackpoints (which seems to be a HP special) can pass any professional QA test in the field. Even my 20+ years old very first Thinkpad had three buttons with its trackpoint!
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It's the row of keys to the right of return with Home, End etc. I have a HP Elitebook with the same keyboard design at work and it takes some getting used to. How they are able to not make the arrow keys larger even when they have an extra row of keys is just total stupidity. Compared to my Thinkpad T430s and X230 that I use at home, the Elitebook is tolerable, but not for more than 3-4 hours of continuous typing, whereas the Thinkpads (and these aren't even Thinkpads of the generations that had really good keyboards) are good for a whole day's use.
The lack of middle click button is of course also a problem. And how can you make a developer laptop without an Ethernet port? USB-C works, but having to carry a dongle is much more cumbersome than having 5 millimeters more of thickness on the thick end of a laptop.
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LibreOffice opens those files fine. I use LibreOffice at work even if we have MS Office because with LO, I can turn off the toolbars and on the sidebar. This gives me a UI that doesn't eat up half my screen in the direction every modern screen has fewest pixels, but instead lets me focus on the content I am working on. The Ribbon UI is garbage designed for tablets and should have never left the designers head. It is so incredibly inefficient to have to click three times just to get to something that in LO with the sidebar is one click away. And don't get me started on MS Office push towards OneDrive. Why can't I get the save dialog by hitting ctrl-s instead of having to click through a full screen window and then a dialog to get to the dialog I should have gotten in the first place. The UI designers that work at Microsoft definitely work hard to make any action be as many clicks as possible even when you try to avoid the clicks by using a keyboard shortcut. I know I can hide the ribbon, but then it is even more cumbersome to get to functionality than when it is always stealing a third of my laptops screen in the direction I have fewest pixels. Since LO opens MS Office files fine, I work in LO (and impress my colleagues by having a sleeker UI every time any of them notices) and save in MS Office formats to comply with the use of non-open, non-standard formats that is common thoughtless moronic practice in the corporate sphere.
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Yes, but the keyboard has an extra row to the right to make that off-center with the screen, so if you use your laptop in the normal way, your hands will point to the left when you look straight ahead on the screen. (The other alternative is to always look to the right if you have your hands pointing straight ahead which is bad for the neck.) That is very unergonomic design not fit for developers that use their laptop 8 hours or more a day. After fourty years of laptop design, this should be obvious to any OEM.
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Cute and pithy. However as someone who actually tried to use Libreoffice in the Enterprise, I would say that I would love not having to spend big bucks on Office licensing. But I can’t because Libreoffice has a 1024 column limit and I have users who regularly exceed that.
Libreoffice needs to meet or exceed Excel’s capabilities and it just doesn’t. Where you really notice that is in spreadsheets that excel opens and creates fine, but Libreoffice chokes on.
A smug and unearned sense of superiority for using OpenSource doesn’t help you hand wave the business requirements of those who make my company’s money. At the end of the day the question becomes, “tool A does the Job, tool B doesn’t. Why are you insisting on tool B?”
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If you actually look at the screen while typing or using the trackpoint, this design is unergonomic because your hands will be skewed towards the left if your head is centred with the screen. Or you are constantly looking to the right if your head and arms are centred with the trackpoint. The problem is that HP has added a row of keys to the right of return with Home, End etc that made the keyboard's space off-centre, whereas normally it is centred or only slightly off centre to the left. The more off-centre the trackpoint and home rows are, the more problematic for long time typing if you sit in a normal way. Maybe all HP designers use external screens with their laptops and therefore don't understand this problem, but any OEM should know this after forty years of laptop design. Somehow, HP still adds this unwanted row to the right to all their 14 inch laptops to fill in the gap otherwise left on the sides. I would prefer a more ergonomic laptop with a larger gap since ergonomy is the number one priority of IO for a tool you would use hours and hours each day.
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Read my post where I was exactly specific with what Libreoffice can’t do that Excel can.
Look handwaving peoples needs away just needs to end. I fought the old fights. I tried with Linux on the desktop. I am trying it now in limited cases.
But at the end of the day, when I am looking a a CEO, and I say, hey I can spend x to train users how to use linux and some other application, or we can use what 99.9% of the user population and almost all the potential hiring base will expect with little to no training at all.
Your answer to this conundrum can’t be in the form of philosophy about “Micro$oft” it has to be in the form of an economic use case.
Until someone does, Linux is a limited to a tool doe specific use cases where I can limit user interaction with it.
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I have to admit I kinda struggle with a use case that would require 1000+ columns for a spreadsheet, then
again - I always dread having to open any excel-type document, except for the running monthly budget. And even taht one gets dumped to CSV as soon as it's done - to be processed in Python.
On the usability side: LO definitely does not cover all cases needed for enterprise, which is likely in part b/c its existing userbase did not have a need for those features.
OTOH having had the displeasure of working with web-based MS office I am disgusted by their UI design. As has been noted here before: simple operations take lots of click&scan due to the ribbon and the variable size of the symbols. Simple, classic, menus used by LibreOffice are IMHO superior to the stuff MS office does now. And I will not start on the online requirements.
Overall I think MS office has a 'better' foundation/engine and pool of operations that can be used, but LO wins on the UI (and memory).
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Why is it always labeled a "developers" edition? I got a Dell XPS a while back that came with Linux pre-installed and that also was a "developers" edition.
I just used it as a regular laptop and never developed anything on it.
I just used it as a regular laptop and never developed anything on it.
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The last tolerable laptop keyboard was the Thinkpad *30 generation in my opinion. That was in 2012. Since then, I have not tried any keyboard that was actually usable for long time typing. Of course, the *30 generation Thinkpad was worse than the 7 row actually good keyboards preceding them, but there are advantages to using this generation now since it was the last generation to use M-processors instead of U-processors (ie, higher performance than the Ultrabook Thinkpads that followed them until around 2018 when the U-processors finally get to about the same performance as the 2012 M-processors and higher performance than the M-processored machines that preceeded them), they all have USB 3 which is a must if you ever copy a file over USB (you can use an Expresscard 54 in earlier non-USB3 Thinkpads, but you don't get full USB 3 speeds) and as I mentioned, I think they are the last laptops with actually usable keyboards. Apple ruined laptops by making them into fashion statements instead of functional, ergonomic hardware for long time use and for some strange reason, all the other OEMs followed their idiotic direction towards thinness over every thing that actually is important in laptop design.
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I use Impress, but I don't think I've ever seen a powerpoint file that it has been able to render with 100% fidelity. There is always at least minor borkage, and frequently major borkage, that leads to at a lot of time fixing, or just giving up (more common for me, since I'm not very good with Impress, I usually use latex beamer).
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It's because OEMs have to target an audience to market their products to and they have yet to discover that many non-developers also use a good operating system. Developers and their employers are a group of people generally willing to spend a bit of money on a machine that fits their requirements which are often high-end enough to be profitable for the OEM and since many developers prefer to develop on the operating system they deploy their code to the major OEMs target their higher end, nicer machines that come with Linux towards developers.
IMO, any sane sysadmin, devops or cloud admin would also use Linux unless they are administrating Windows. Just being stuck with MS' bad user interfaces (or Mac OS' slightly better ones) is reason enough to switch to an OS where you can actually choose if you want tablety Gnome, customisabiliting KDE Plasma, Windows-clone Cinnamon, light and fast MATE, XFCE, LXQt, LXDE, JWM, IceWM or Englightenment or efficient tiling goodness like i3, dwm, bspwm, sway, qtile, xmonad, ratpoison... I use Sway on my personal machines which is nice to avoid spending time dragging Windows around like I have to do at work where I am forced to use Windows. I am so much more efficient when I work from my own machine than I am using MS' bad GUIs.
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macosandlinux
Ars Praefectus
Running Pop!_OS in dual-boot and could not order a System76 unit myself (US only), so this HP would be the perfect solution for me. But damn, again no love for non-US customers (while ZBooks are available). One can hope that HP will widen the rollout later on, and System76 support proves itself.
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The choices seem ok resulting in a good price. I like AMD cpu's, have spent money needlessly on discrete GPU's before, thinking to do more Cuda (or similar); in reality, I did just a single useful program involving Cuda.
However, I don't trust HP because of some experiences with printers and a laptop where the high temps from the cooling unit heated up the battery, reducing it's effective lifetime to about half a year (this was 10 years ago, really put me off, but perhaps this is resolved).
AMD cpu runs hot and certainly at high perf (4.4 GHz), so I assume forced ventilation is in place.
The specs don't have info about cooling (or noise), nor, btw, about the case material - it could be plastic which would really put me off.
So with a - by itself nice - slim form, I won't trust a HP laptop before getting positive reports after longer usage, and in the mean time I will certainly look at other options.
But the package looks good to me. Even the 720p cam is ok to me, as an old guy
I lost (most of) my vanity anyway.
Which brings me to a wish: with products like this which (may) prove important to the audience, I think a follow up report would be great. Perhaps not easy to do, but interesting nevertheless.
However, I don't trust HP because of some experiences with printers and a laptop where the high temps from the cooling unit heated up the battery, reducing it's effective lifetime to about half a year (this was 10 years ago, really put me off, but perhaps this is resolved).
AMD cpu runs hot and certainly at high perf (4.4 GHz), so I assume forced ventilation is in place.
The specs don't have info about cooling (or noise), nor, btw, about the case material - it could be plastic which would really put me off.
So with a - by itself nice - slim form, I won't trust a HP laptop before getting positive reports after longer usage, and in the mean time I will certainly look at other options.
But the package looks good to me. Even the 720p cam is ok to me, as an old guy
I lost (most of) my vanity anyway.Which brings me to a wish: with products like this which (may) prove important to the audience, I think a follow up report would be great. Perhaps not easy to do, but interesting nevertheless.
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I have an HP laptop with the a very similar keyboard layout. It's not great. I keep pressing page down instead of return, and home instead of backspace. Also the up/down arrows keys are too small.
At least the control key is in the correct position.
At least the control key is in the correct position.
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Speaking of off-keyboards, in the UK HP is one of the manufacturers which insists on doing UK-ANSI keyboards, instead of UK-ISO which is almost univeral (and pretty much was universal, up until HP started this). Regardless of peoples preference, it's really annoying to use the less common keyboard, especially as the only reason is so that HP can save the cost of one keyboard button per laptop.
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A developers' laptop that doesn't have an ethernet port? Call me old fashioned but that feels wrong. Other than that this looks like a reasonable replacement for my ageing MBP 13". Not so long ago a 1Tb SSE would cost more than this machine!
BTW, are those USB-C ports Thunderbolt compatible, or did that go overboard with the choice for AMD? I have a (1st gen) Belkin Th.bolt dock that I'd like to keep using if in any way possible!
BTW, are those USB-C ports Thunderbolt compatible, or did that go overboard with the choice for AMD? I have a (1st gen) Belkin Th.bolt dock that I'd like to keep using if in any way possible!
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Oh boy now we can have a talk.
I have (and at least sometimes use) a W520, W530, P51 and P17g2. So there is the *30 series you mention. The W520 is the last pre-chicklet. I think that between the P51 and P17 there is a level of keyboard thinning that I am missing, and I probably anything you buy today is thinner than the P17. So they take it in steps. Lots and lots of small steps. Very determined effort on the part of Lenovo.
IME, the P51 only feels thin when you switch to the W530. When not swapping back and forth I don't notice any issue. Most hours in recent years went to the P51 and so unsurprisingly the P17g2 takes some getting used to. They keyboard and buttons are shallower, I guess worse, but perhaps its a matter of getting used to it. I'll need more time. But yeah, the *30 series timeframe had a pretty good keyboard.
Using the W520 and P51 side by side does not really leave me in love with the W520, although again its the P51 that has gotten the most hours recently by far. I think I am out of practice with the pre-chicklet typing. I'd probably pick the W530 keyboard as the best I have on hand.
The touchpoint buttons have really lost some shape over the years, and not for the better.
Another ergonomic failing we can complain about is the loss of the rounded edge under the wrists. That had to go, obviously. No way to have a feature like that these days. Its a slightly worse product, but the visuals are good.
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I was at first very offended by the numpad on my P51 (and now P17g2) which is of course a much bigger offset than this HP has. However I got used to it. Maybe I use the right edge of the screen less.
Also I discovered that the numpad is great for entering MFA keys.
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A 16384 column limit for Calc has been an experimental feature for a long time, but has now finally been deemed stable enough to be promoted not just to non-experimental, but to be set as the default in v7.4.
V7.4 is currently in the release pipeline and due for general release in the week commencing 15th August. If that was the only significant obstacle, maybe it's worth giving it another try? Of course, there may be other show-stoppers which you didn't want to go into, in which case fine. I think LO is great and it suits my needs but I am a realist who recognises that for some cases only Excel will do.
Release notes for V7.4:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Rel ... s/7.4#Calc
Release schedule:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleasePlan
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Or they could have let the arrow keys extend below the spacebar line, and used the space above left and right arrow to fit in some of those extra buttons they crammed in on the left, and placed the rest with the F-keys.
But maybe we are just too used to ThinkPads, it would just be nice if somebody would at least _try_ to compete with ThinkPads, now that Lenovo is doing weird things to them.
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Looks like a fine option for anyone who wants a Linux laptop that just works. Pricing is good for the specs, has decent IO, trackpoint, and having the HP name on it will make it easier to convince corporate IT to buy them.
Main downsides are the 16:9 screen and nonstandard keyboard layout. But neither of those will be huge issues for people who are docking them 90%+ of the time.
Main downsides are the 16:9 screen and nonstandard keyboard layout. But neither of those will be huge issues for people who are docking them 90%+ of the time.
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Yes, that's what I'm thinking every day when using a similar keyboard for SW development on the EliteBook 840 Aero.
The keyboard on my HP laptop is rubbish. The keys are shifted a bit, to have the extra column with Home, End etc, so I constantly hit the wrong keys. Like hitting Pgup instead of Enter (or in the middle). The arrow keys have been designed to look at.. not for navigating around in code. And at least the keys on my HP are way to stiff to be comfortable to use. I hate this keyboard. But on a laptop you can't just buy a new one (unless you use it as a desktop with an external monitor) .
The XPS13 I had before had a much much better keyboard and also all the Asus that I have at home have varying degrees of better keyboards than the current HP I'm stuck with all day.
Edit: spelling.. this keybard is hard to use
I'm using a cheap and nasty HP 14" PoS right now, and it has exactly the same stupidity. My normal foible is to hit Home instead of Backspace...
(and it's USB-C port is data only, no PD, no alt-modes for any video standards....thanks HP, for missing the point completely!)
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Big spreadsheets were the breaking problem for me with LibreOffice. Even before the giant data dumps we were generating for our customer* had so many columns that LibreOffice and Google Sheets refused to open them at all, Calc's column filters would time out making it impossible to filter on things like the username column.
* We were exporting into excel instead of CSV because several columns included user generated text and there was no good and consistent way to escape a CSV that worked everywhere. I've always wondered if the stats tool they loaded the data into could read .xlsx directly, or if they were just save-asing to CSV and unwittingly running their analysis on a mangled data set. We ever never allowed to talk to their stats person to see if we could do anything to make things easier for them though, so that's on them if so...
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A person with the money to buy this and the technical competency to use it can:
A. create a Windows 11 virtual machine using KVM, VMWare Workstation Player or - ugh - VirtualBox
B. purchase a Windows 11 license ($100 from Microsoft, 1/3 of that from a legal reseller)
Not only can people who run Linux natively do this, but you can even do it using the Linux CONTAINER on a Chromebook: https://beebom.com/install-windows-10-chromebook
People who say "yeah I like Linux but totally can't give up this app that I absolutely need" just need to admit that they like Windows and want everyone else to. The same crowd
A. shouts from the rooftops about HOW BLATANTLY OVERPRICED Macs are (when they are only maybe $100 more than a Dell or HP with the same specs)
B. hops onto EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE ON THE INTERNET on any Chromebook that costs more than $400 to leave some variation of the same "why pay so much just to run web apps when for the same money you can get a Windows laptop that does so much more including run Office" comment.
We get it. You like Windows. It has like 75% to 80% market share so you have a lot of company. Good for you. But the rest of us have different needs - or wants - OK? And there are even various ways to still run Windows - or at least Windows apps - if we really need to. I have no use for Office but still absolutely need Notepad++ from time to time, and WINE gets that job done.
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Ha ha. Even ignoring the text layout 'engine' which makes even regular text paragraphs look like ass, you haven't lived until you battled one of the numerous random rearrangements Word routinely performs when text is combined with pictures, or had to manually re-number 200+ references in an academic paper after Word/Endnote corrupts the document somehow, and just stops updating them.
Word is basically the Dunning Kruger of word processing
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I mostly only use office suites for talks and presentations, so as usual ymmv, but I hate libreoffice impress. I mean, I use it...but I hate it. The thing is, I want my documents in a format that I am reasonably confident I can still access in 10 years, so Google is out, and I have office 365 but I don't want to have to access it through the browser when giving a talk in a foreign institution where I don't know if eduroam would work, so MS is out too (and Google is double out).
Over the years I've tried just about every Linux friendly method of generating slides, including Beamer (videos are a PITA, so are custom graphical elements that you want to slap together in 10 mins), à few of those markdown things, and I keep coming back to Impress. Despite that, Impress has had random graphical glitches on media playback, elements move slightly on copy-paste, terrible defaults such as a title slide where the title is in the same place as a content slide, etc. I hate to say it but I've been making talks on Linux for the last 5 years + and it's never been anywhere near as seamless as MS office.
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I've had good luck over the years with a VirtualBox VM and Win10/Office installed.
Duke out
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