HP To Begin Preloading Ubuntu 20.04 On Select Laptops Paired With Data Science Stack

HP today announced a new Ubuntu Linux offering for select mobile workstations and notebooks in the form of the "Z by HP Data Science Software" package. This isn't just pre-loading the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS OEM version on the notebook but calling it a day, rather it's been pre-loaded as well with a variety of data science software packages.

Z by HP Data Science Software pre-installs a variety of data science libraries, developer tools, Docker container support, and other extras atop the Ubuntu 20.04 desktop. Some of the pre-installed offerings with "Z by HP Data Science Software" include NVIDIA's RAPIDS and CUDA components pre-installed along with the proprietary driver and common machine learning libraries like TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, and more.

Visual Studio Code, PyCharm, and other tools are also bundled. While the mobile workstations where this software pre-load is available offer a fair amount of power, the Z by HP Data Science Software also includes support for making it easy to offload work to Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud.

Devices that will be available with this Ubuntu Linux data science preload beginning later this month include the HP Z4, HP Z6, and HP Z8 workstations as well as the HP ZBook Create G7 and HP ZBook Studio G7. Additional HP devices with this Ubuntu Linux pre-configured stack are expected in 2021.

Surely disappointing to some Linux enthusiasts, the HP mobile workstations / notebooks offering this preload are so far limited to Intel CPUs with NVIDIA graphics - not yet any AMD CPUs or Radeon graphics. Hopefully with the continually improving open-source AMD ROCm compute stack and continued Ryzen successes, some AMD offerings will be made available by HP especially for those preferring open-source driver stacks.

More details on this latest HP Linux push via press.hp.com.