HP ZBook Studio G7 Aims To Attract Linux Developers, Data Scientists

[Paradigm Shifter]

I don't know what is up with OEM customizers these days but they keep getting worse over the decades.

Agreed. Web gets more and more bloated. I watched a site download over 10MB of data yesterday... to display seven paragraphs of text and a small header image. That cannot be efficient for anyone!

[JosiahBradley]

???

When I went to have a look out of curiosity when the article was originally posted, I had no trouble adding it to my cart.

It's been a month and I can reproduce the error on Desktop Linux using Firefox 87, however was able to get past it. Originally on mobile I get the keyboard is required error, but no option to choose one, however on desktop I get the same error but am given a choice of 2 keyboards. It's a really bad mobile site and was super slow.

I don't know what is up with OEM customizers these days but they keep getting worse over the decades. Lenovo's page won;t even get past the JavaScript loading for instance.

[Paradigm Shifter]

You literally cannot buy this from HP, selecting Linux removes the option for keyboard (wtf) as it's listed as a Windows only feature. This means you can't add it to the cart as it's missing a keyboard. You also need to select a RTX 3000 minimum card to use the data science option at 4 grand (if you could buy it). I'm really interested in a Linux Laptop but until big box vendors figure out how to make a website, I'll stick with the botiques.

???

When I went to have a look out of curiosity when the article was originally posted, I had no trouble adding it to my cart.

I went to check. I followed the link to HP.com in the last page of the article, which takes to you the page for this laptop. I clicked "Customize & Buy". I then clicked the "Data Science" pre-config (which is basically every option maxed except the SSD) and then "Add to Cart", which succeeded. Although I went no further after that point.

I further got no error when I selected the base config and then manually chose Ubuntu Linux 20.04.

Your criticism regarding being unable to select the Data Science stack without selecting the RTX card is confirmed.

Tried on Chrome 89 and Firefox 86.

If you're that interested, I'd try again.

It does seem that in an attempt to make the configure page idiot proof, they've turned around and made some stupid choices with regards to how it interacts with the selected options. I don't really find that page terribly intuitive - although I've seen worse.

[branana]

Question for the reviewer or anyone who’s had a HP Linux machine. If I need to restore or reinstall the laptop, does HP provide an Ubuntu installation image on their website?

[JosiahBradley]

You literally cannot buy this from HP, selecting Linux removes the option for keyboard (wtf) as it's listed as a Windows only feature. This means you can't add it to the cart as it's missing a keyboard. You also need to select a RTX 3000 minimum card to use the data science option at 4 grand (if you could buy it). I'm really interested in a Linux Laptop but until big box vendors figure out how to make a website, I'll stick with the botiques.

[nils_]

I'm wondering if the target audience would actually run an OS preinstalled by the hardware vendor. I certainly would wipe it, if only to ensure no third party has potential access to the encryption key for the disk.

[Davidovitch]

HP are known offenders of broken ACPI tables. That is why I like to direct people to Lenovo Thinkpads. Those do get certified as Linux ready in a large number of models, even the AMD powered ones, even if you couldn't get one with Linux pre-installed.

Exactly. Seems also that Alex Deucher confirms that is not necessarily an AMD only issue, but depends heavily on the rest of the platform as well. Taken directly from the bug tracker here:

We are still actively working on this. The problem with modern standby in general is that all of the devices in the platform are involved. You may have 12 devices in the system but only 2 or 3 power rails. All of the devices sharing a power rail need to be in the right state before the platform can shut down the power rail. It means auditing all the drivers for all of the devices on the platform and how they interact with the platform firmware to figure out why certain power rails are not being powered down. If the power rail is not properly shutdown on suspend, the hardware may not be in the expected state at resume time. On top of that there are certain assumptions in the platform about the sequencing of all of this that are the same between Linux and Windows. For example, the issues with the C2/C3 latency values in some platforms, the quirks needed for the USB controllers, and we've also run into issues with some nvme devices which are still being debugged.

[squash]

Imagine buying a laptop with an Intel CPU in 2021...

[[email protected]]

Properly working suspend support is critical. I've faced that same problem with suspend for years, on AMD GPUs. Most of the time, it goes unfixed for years. Blank screen after suspend and resume, or just plain refusing to suspend. Which means your only option is to shutdown and startup each time.

There's a reason I say AMDs Linux support is shoddy. Personal experience with several different AMD CPUs and GPUs for more than 10 years. It's crap support compared to Intel.

HP are known offenders of broken ACPI tables. That is why I like to direct people to Lenovo Thinkpads. Those do get certified as Linux ready in a large number of models, even the AMD powered ones, even if you couldn't get one with Linux pre-installed.

[hansdegoede]

Michael, I wonder if the speaker and mic mute-LEDs work (light up if you mute them) ?

I don't see any support for HP spk/mic mute LEDs under drivers/platform/x86, but I guess they could be directly connected to GPIOs on the audio codec.