HP Dev One - A Great, Well Engineered AMD Ryzen Linux Laptop

[jacob]

A "DEV" machine is something that doesn't need a fancy 3D card.
If you want to play games or do rendering, then you need a "multimedia laptop", not a DEV laptop ...So, basically any laptop with a NVidia GPU is not a DEV laptop.
The Dell XPS 15 would have been perfect for me if it did not have a NVidia card.
It only waste power, generate heat and complicate drivers.

A DEV machine may very well need a real and well supported GPU. Not everyone develops websites. Maybe I'm are developing something that uses 3D graphics or otherwise performs GPU computation. And besides that, I want a full GNOME environment, which needs a GPU by itself. I'm not all that interested in non-mainstream distros and especially in the likes of i3 or even XFCE...

[deusexmachina]

Would buy if it has an OLED display. Why do all "work laptops" have shitty displays? At least let us be able to replace it... Or hopefully frame.work will make display replacement w/ some OLED models possibld

[deusexmachina]

I know I'm a bit late to this thread but I did a ctrl+f on all 8 pages and found that nobody seemed to mention ECC memory support...

So yeah, it would have been nice to see if ECC memory worked or not since the Pro-SKU APUs are supposed to have that enabled in AGESA unlike for non-Pro-SKU APUs (at which point it would hinge on whether the motherboard itself includes the necessary additional traces for ECC or not).

Right, there are some framework ECC threads to support on their forum - for those interested.

The AMD CPUs like this (PRO) all natively support ECC! So it is a shame to see none of the companies building computers with these chips even allowing us to install our own ECC - motherboard support would be easy and cheap!

[deusexmachina]

A real question considering battery life and suspend durability is what Lenovo seems to have given up on in their new AMD laptops: proper s0ix support and correctly functioning s3 in many cases.

[deusexmachina]

Long time without seeing you on these forms Luke_wolf. In your mind what would make a good developer's laptop?

I'm happy to answer as well:
16:10 qd-oled
Upgradable RAM to 64GB (unreg ECC compatible, like all Ryzen Pros already are)
Attempt durability like thinkpad
PCIe slot that's full speed / no added latency (frame.work decided against so far)
Some modular keyboard types. For me closer to older thinkpad and ortholinear.
hot swap batteries
2 NVMe slots
latest AMD integrated graphics
Work with "Project X" to get a corebooted ryzen

I hope frame.work does this as they are close!

[Sin2x]

FYI, several years ago I bought a generic thin/light HP laptop (one of their first Ryzen models) for my wife and after a little over a year (conveniently right after the warranty ran out) the thing had literally torn itself apart. The laptop has metal hinges for the screen which is fantastic, but the hinges are anchored into the plastic screen housing using pressure-fit screw mounts. The stress of opening and closing the laptop screen causes the plastic surrounding those screw mounts to fail and hinge ends up tearing itself out of the screen housing. Note that this laptop was otherwise in pristine condition and saw mild/gentle use. There are tons of reports with people having the exact same problem and HP claimed it was user wear and tear and was charging people hundreds of dollars (nearly half the value of the laptop) to fix it.

This model has a different hinge design so perhaps it is immune from this problem, but after seeing how poorly constructed the machine is over all I'll never purchase another HP laptop. The generic Chinese gaming laptop I got my daughter is far sturdier and easier to work on.

hp_hinge_flaw.jpg

Don't ever buy non-MIL-STD-810-tested notebooks, irregardless of the brand. They are meant to be disposable.

[mmstick]

Absolutely incorrect.

A "Dev Laptop" properly is a class of enterprise grade hardware more commonly known as a Mobile Workstation handed out by businesses to developers. It's not whatever random computer you want to develop on for your personal enjoyment. By definition they are high spec machines relative to the current hardware ecosystem using enterprise grade hardware. They need docking station capability which lives it's life in your cube, hooked up to 2-3 monitors and other peripherals, but is also expected to have a decent built-in keyboard and a large (historically replaceable) battery for on the go. This combination of requirements means they are absolute bricks.

What HP and Dell are trying to do is take barebones basic tier enterprise-grade ultrabooks that businesses hand off to HR, middle managers, and the like and passing that off to consumers as something it's not.

Did you see the benchmarks here? The Ryzen CPU in this laptop is overkill for the audience you're describing. They'd be fine with a $400 Pentium netbook. Silicon manufacturing has gotten to the point where even a lightweight ultrabook can readily replace a workstation desktop that developers were using a few years ago. You can totally connect to a docking station with 2-3 monitors with this laptop. There's an HDMI 2.0 port, and a DisplayPort 1.4-compatible USB-C port.

The 5850U is only slightly slower than my desktop with a Ryzen 7 5700G. And speaking as a software developer that develops software in Rust, which notoriously requires a high number of CPU cycles to compile software, this CPU is perfect for developing Rust projects with. Even with the default 16GB configuration, since I'm not building web browsers you know?

[spirit]

" laptop optimized for Linux developers" ?

The keyboard layout just sucks.

half-sized up/down ?
power button between printscr && delete ?

pageup/pageodown/home/fin vertical on the right ?

Why can't we have classic layout keyboard like previous laptop ? Thanks Apple, everybody is following you.

(IMHO, only thinkpad still have good keyboard)

[Mez']

Sadly, and as usual from bigger brands, they only see Linux as a developers' market. This laptop, like the XPS or Thinkpads is made for developers and developers only.
Pretty useless for 95% of computer users.

[Mez']

" laptop optimized for Linux developers" ?

The keyboard layout just sucks.

half-sized up/down ?
power button between printscr && delete ?

pageup/pageodown/home/fin vertical on the right ?

Why can't we have classic layout keyboard like previous laptop ? Thanks Apple, everybody is following you.

(IMHO, only thinkpad still have good keyboard)

Thinkpad keyboard is the worst I've ever used.

Between that pointer in the middle (any sane person disable it first thing), the prominent physical buttons that you trigger randomly while typing because they're still on top of the trackpad and that stupid swap between Ctrl and Fn (even if you switch it in the BIOS, you get a small Ctrl button while it is much more useful than Fn). I only had to use it for 3 months as I switched jobs but it's still the most terrible laptop keyboard+touchpad combination I've ever used.