5 ms·

16GB RAM? Is it upgradable or can it be configured higher? If not, why in god's name would you have 16GB RAM as a selling point? FHD at 14"? That's more than u

by messe 4y ago

16GB RAM? Is it upgradable or can it be configured higher? If not, why in god's name would you have 16GB RAM as a selling point? FHD at 14"? That's more than usable sure, but I'd prefer at least 2560x1440, preferably 2560x1600; A 16:9 aspect ratio is a pain in the ass. 4 years ago, these specs (if you can even call it that, we've been given almost no information) would have been decent. Now? This just seems desperate. EDIT: I know this is quite critical. I like that there is a laptop out there from a traditional OEM, that is being supplied with Pop! OS. I just wish it was a better laptop, because the person looking for a laptop with Pop! OS is more than likely going to be looking for one with decent specs and may have enough additional income to spend on those specs. Other than the 1TB drive (I'm happy with 256GB in a lot of cases thanks to my NAS and streaming), this feels like the bare minimum specs for a laptop in 2022.

Rebelgecko 4y ago
I haven't used Pop!_OS so maybe this isn't a valid concern, but some Linux distros have a hard time with DPI scaling, especially by non-integer amounts... So you could end up with an unfortunate situation where a 1440p screen is too small to read at 1x scaling but too clunky to use at 2x
- messe 4y ago
  I believe Pop!_OS is based on GNOME, which handles fractional scaling in the same way as macOS, by rendering the UI at 2x and then scaling down. In my experience with macOS, this is good enough for ~95% of cases (I've run into issues with image editing and pixel art). It hurts battery life, but... this is a developer laptop: make it a bit thicker, and give it as much battery as you legally can. EDIT: If you're going to down this, please share your disagreement in the comments below; fractional scaling has some good arguments on either side, I'd be interested to hear another perspective.
  - freeAgent 4y ago
    Not downvoting, but it’s problematic on Linux when you hook up a second display at different scaling/resolution. Whenever I’m in Linux in my home office, I regret having 4K monitors that require scaling to be readable.
    - toastal 4y ago
      This is one of the advantages of Wayland
na85 4y ago
>If not, why in god's name would you have 16GB RAM as a selling point? With 16 GB you can run two whole Electron apps!
- messe 4y ago
  Slack and VSCode. What else does a developer laptop need?
  - er4hn 4y ago
    Spotify for my flow state picks. How can I get in the zone without soothing music and ideally some noise cancelling Bluetooth headphones? Of course, to really work without distractions I'll close Slack.
    - petepete 4y ago
      Give Spot a try https://github.com/xou816/spot https://github.com/xou816/spot
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Radeon graphics and 16GB memory for $1,100 sounds like a good deal imo.
- qzw 4y ago
  It's not clear whether it's also got a dGPU or just the iGPU. Both are Radeon graphics. The vagueness of the description leads me to guess it only has an iGPU.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    Ah, gotcha. I assumed discrete graphics.
  - teleforce 4y ago
    GPU aside, the fact it comes with FHD not QHD is a bummer. FHD probably just fine for gaming but for text based works like programming, writing, etc, for me the QHD display is a minimum necessity.
- metadat 4y ago
  $1,100 for bad graphics card laptop notebook seems like a pretty underwhelming deal. Costco has better bargains every day or nearly every day.
metadat 4y ago
- qzw 4y ago
  To be fair, this HP does seem like a fairly minimal-effort marketing exercise. It claims to be "Built for developers", but it doesn't really have any special developer-oriented features, other than maybe the keyboard and the preloaded Linux distro. Kind of reminds me of some of the early "For Gamerz!!!" products that were actually just tarted-up commodity junk.
  - julianlam 4y ago
    If System76 did more than just license their logo, then it could very well have been optimized for Linux. For a company that has no specialized team for distro development, partnering with System76 was probably a really good idea.
- innocenat 4y ago
  This is exactly my impression reading the post on laptops/phones here the past few days. I now understood why the manufactures doesn't really seems to care for this segment, as everyone seems to have enough dealbreakers that nothing's going to sell well.
  - sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
    I think it's pretty cool, right now I use the clevo-based lemur pro (I'm pretty happy with it) when mobile and would consider this for my next upgrade especially if a decent SKU exists at $1,100 my lemur with 1tb/16gb ram ended up costing around 2k I think
- messe 4y ago
  While I agree I'm being picky; for you, what's the minimal spec OEM machine that would still necessitate that comment? If somebody came out today with a machine with 2GB of RAM, a 1024x600 display, and a 128GB SSD; we'd all agree that that's not a developer machine. So what's the minimum for you?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lhl 4y ago
This looks like an EliteBook or ProBook (they're the only ones with trackpoints, the chassis looks most similar to the 845 G8/G9, but the logo and display looks more like a ProBook - it's not using the classic not the premium HP logo). Both these models which typically have 2 x SODIMMs, making it one of the better options for thin and lights for upgradeability. HP never has high-res panels for their business laptops, which is one of the reasons I don't even consider them (the other is that they usually don't have S3 suspend support, but for an officially supported Linux version, I'll assume they're at least going to spend a bit more time making sure it can suspend properly). For the price, it seems fine, although I'd probably go for the similarly priced Starlabs Starbook Mk V if you were ok w/ FHD: https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook (it has a 5800U) Or bite the bullet w/ 12th-gen Alder Lake P and go with the latest Framework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31433556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31433556 Personally, I'm looking most closely atm at the newly announced (but not yet shipping anywhere) Asus Vivobook S 14X OLED (M5402): https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Vivobook/Vivobook-S-14X-OLED-M5402-AMD-Ryzen-6000-Series/ https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Vivobook/Vivobook-S-14... * 45W Ryzen 6900HX (I'll assume RyzenAdj support will come eventually https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj/issues/197 https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj/issues/197) * 8GB DDR5 soldered, 1 SO-DIMM so up to 40GB of memory * A ridiculously good display: 14.5" 2880x1800 16:10 120Hz OLED w/ 550nit brightness, 100% DCI-P3, HDR500, Pantone validated (and reportedly no PWM flicker on this generation) * Decent ports - 1xUSB 2.0, 1xUSB 3.2, 2xUSB C, HDMI 2.0, 3.5mm combo audio jack * 1.6kg

by messe 4y ago

Rebelgecko 4y ago

I haven't used Pop!_OS so maybe this isn't a valid concern, but some Linux distros have a hard time with DPI scaling, especially by non-integer amounts... So you could end up with an unfortunate situation where a 1440p screen is too small to read at 1x scaling but too clunky to use at 2x

messe 4y ago
I believe Pop!_OS is based on GNOME, which handles fractional scaling in the same way as macOS, by rendering the UI at 2x and then scaling down. In my experience with macOS, this is good enough for ~95% of cases (I've run into issues with image editing and pixel art). It hurts battery life, but... this is a developer laptop: make it a bit thicker, and give it as much battery as you legally can. EDIT: If you're going to down this, please share your disagreement in the comments below; fractional scaling has some good arguments on either side, I'd be interested to hear another perspective.
- freeAgent 4y ago
  Not downvoting, but it’s problematic on Linux when you hook up a second display at different scaling/resolution. Whenever I’m in Linux in my home office, I regret having 4K monitors that require scaling to be readable.
  - toastal 4y ago
    This is one of the advantages of Wayland

na85 4y ago

>If not, why in god's name would you have 16GB RAM as a selling point? With 16 GB you can run two whole Electron apps!

messe 4y ago
Slack and VSCode. What else does a developer laptop need?
- er4hn 4y ago
  Spotify for my flow state picks. How can I get in the zone without soothing music and ideally some noise cancelling Bluetooth headphones? Of course, to really work without distractions I'll close Slack.
  - petepete 4y ago
    Give Spot a try https://github.com/xou816/spot https://github.com/xou816/spot

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Radeon graphics and 16GB memory for $1,100 sounds like a good deal imo.

qzw 4y ago
It's not clear whether it's also got a dGPU or just the iGPU. Both are Radeon graphics. The vagueness of the description leads me to guess it only has an iGPU.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Ah, gotcha. I assumed discrete graphics.
- teleforce 4y ago
  GPU aside, the fact it comes with FHD not QHD is a bummer. FHD probably just fine for gaming but for text based works like programming, writing, etc, for me the QHD display is a minimum necessity.
metadat 4y ago
$1,100 for bad graphics card laptop notebook seems like a pretty underwhelming deal. Costco has better bargains every day or nearly every day.

metadat 4y ago

qzw 4y ago
To be fair, this HP does seem like a fairly minimal-effort marketing exercise. It claims to be "Built for developers", but it doesn't really have any special developer-oriented features, other than maybe the keyboard and the preloaded Linux distro. Kind of reminds me of some of the early "For Gamerz!!!" products that were actually just tarted-up commodity junk.
- julianlam 4y ago
  If System76 did more than just license their logo, then it could very well have been optimized for Linux. For a company that has no specialized team for distro development, partnering with System76 was probably a really good idea.
innocenat 4y ago
This is exactly my impression reading the post on laptops/phones here the past few days. I now understood why the manufactures doesn't really seems to care for this segment, as everyone seems to have enough dealbreakers that nothing's going to sell well.
- sorry_outta_gas 4y ago
  I think it's pretty cool, right now I use the clevo-based lemur pro (I'm pretty happy with it) when mobile and would consider this for my next upgrade especially if a decent SKU exists at $1,100 my lemur with 1tb/16gb ram ended up costing around 2k I think
messe 4y ago
While I agree I'm being picky; for you, what's the minimal spec OEM machine that would still necessitate that comment? If somebody came out today with a machine with 2GB of RAM, a 1024x600 display, and a 128GB SSD; we'd all agree that that's not a developer machine. So what's the minimum for you?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lhl 4y ago

This looks like an EliteBook or ProBook (they're the only ones with trackpoints, the chassis looks most similar to the 845 G8/G9, but the logo and display looks more like a ProBook - it's not using the classic not the premium HP logo). Both these models which typically have 2 x SODIMMs, making it one of the better options for thin and lights for upgradeability. HP never has high-res panels for their business laptops, which is one of the reasons I don't even consider them (the other is that they usually don't have S3 suspend support, but for an officially supported Linux version, I'll assume they're at least going to spend a bit more time making sure it can suspend properly). For the price, it seems fine, although I'd probably go for the similarly priced Starlabs Starbook Mk V if you were ok w/ FHD: https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starbook (it has a 5800U) Or bite the bullet w/ 12th-gen Alder Lake P and go with the latest Framework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31433556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31433556 Personally, I'm looking most closely atm at the newly announced (but not yet shipping anywhere) Asus Vivobook S 14X OLED (M5402): https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Vivobook/Vivobook-S-14X-OLED-M5402-AMD-Ryzen-6000-Series/ https://www.asus.com/Laptops/For-Home/Vivobook/Vivobook-S-14... * 45W Ryzen 6900HX (I'll assume RyzenAdj support will come eventually https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj/issues/197 https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj/issues/197) * 8GB DDR5 soldered, 1 SO-DIMM so up to 40GB of memory * A ridiculously good display: 14.5" 2880x1800 16:10 120Hz OLED w/ 550nit brightness, 100% DCI-P3, HDR500, Pantone validated (and reportedly no PWM flicker on this generation) * Decent ports - 1xUSB 2.0, 1xUSB 3.2, 2xUSB C, HDMI 2.0, 3.5mm combo audio jack * 1.6kg