HP Dev One - A Great, Well Engineered AMD Ryzen Linux Laptop
Earlier this month marked the launch of the HP Dev One as an interesting collaboration between HP and System76 for a laptop optimized for Linux developers and running System76's Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS operating system. It's a very interesting laptop and well thought out for Linux use with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U SoC and integrated Radeon graphics for satisfying the preferences of many Linux developers preferring a fully open-source driver stack. Thanks to the large scale manufacturing of HP, it's also a competitively-priced Linux laptop compared to many of the Linux laptops from smaller vendors that are based on Clevo or other white box laptop designs.
The HP Dev One isn't HP's first entrance into the Linux laptop space but in the past has offered up systems like the HP ZBook Studio G7 that came pre-loaded with Ubuntu Linux. They weren't simply pre-loading Ubuntu either but have experienced with shipping various data science software pre-loaded from machine learning libraries to various developer tools and more. In the last HP ZBook I tested, HP shipped over 40GB of "extras" of curated open-source software onto their stock image.
With their Z by HP Data Science Software effort it was mostly on an otherwise stock Ubuntu installation with some cosmetic changes. Given the focus on data science, to little surprise their prior Linux devices were sporting Intel CPUs with NVIDIA discrete graphics focused on CUDA, RAPIDS, and other NVIDIA software packages. With the HP Dev One, they have took a rather surprising twist by partnering with System76 and leveraging Pop!_OS for a developer/enthusiast-oriented Linux laptop. They are also targeting developers as a whole and thus no big collection of curated software packages either... Which is fine to me at least considering how most of the packages are just one command away thanks to installation from the APT/Debian packages or Flatpaks with Flathub.
The HP Dev One priced at $1099 USD for this all-AMD Linux laptop really strikes a nice price point too for a larger spectrum of developers rather than trying to target just the top-tier Linux developers at an elevated price point, beating on pricing thanks to HP's scale compared to white box laptops traditionally offered by the smaller Linux-focused vendors, and not going too cheap on the components that makes it a woefully under-powered developer machine.
At $1099 USD, the HP Dev One is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U 8-core/16-thread processor with Radeon Vega graphics, 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory, a 1TB NVMe M.2 2280 SSD, and a 1080p 14-inch 1000 nit display. The specs are great and the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U SoC is a wonderful choice for this mid-range to higher-end developer-minded laptop. The only unfortunate area is just having 16GB of RAM as the only option, but it is user-upgradeable to a maximum of 64GB of system RAM. Having 32GB would be a sweet spot but for now at least HP has allotted just one SKU with the 16GB of RAM and relying on users to upgrade the memory themselves if desired.
While just the one laptop SKU, when purchasing the HP Dev One it does offer accessories such as the HP 935 Creator Wireless Mouse and the System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard. Both the System76 keyboard and HP mouse were included as part of our HP Dev One review kit, kindly provided by System76 and HP.