Hardware

It looks polished and sturdy. Full intel chipset, FullHD IPS display. SATA M2 disk (the 512Gb one, the 256Gb I suspect has the NVME). 8Gb ram in a single DDR4 Slot and an i5 7200. Wifi chipset is the intel 8265 AC. So far so good.

The keyboard :-(

The only issue? While a good keyboard with decent response there is no INS key on the keyboard, while there are some bizarre keys with an handset shape, supposed to work with phones. No comment!

After just one year of usage I found the trick. To get the ins key you need to press Fn+E. Need other missing keys?

Fn+C Turns on scroll lock. Fn+E Turns on insert function. Fn+R Breaks the operation. Fn+S Sends a programing query. Fn+W Pauses the operation.

Fan - Battery Issues

On the medium run (1 year of rather mild usage) some glitches are appearing. The fan kicks in too much often, and HP diagnostics just told me the battery needs replacement… And I even enabled the option to charge it to 80% maximum to preserve its duration… Sad…

I think I found an equilibrium on the fan issue. At least on Linux, it looks like that the fan kicks even with very low temperatures. The solution to mitigate it is to raise the temperatures a bit

stress -c 2 -m 2

until the fan resets himself or varies its speed. Then it stays fairly stable. I suspect a heat pipe problem. But with covid, no support available.

It looks like that the system fan goes mad if temperatures are too low… Switched to a performance cpu governor and things got even better. Against any common sense… But keeping my finger crossed…

After the lockdown period I wanted to have the pc fixed. I got a replacement one. Definitely worth the hassle. If you got fans spinning like mad and 35 degrees inside, RMA it. The “new” one goes up to 65 degrees prior to become noisy…

Got some problems with the new one, from the Italian state buying service, it wasn’t exactly mint, but the peace and quiet is worth it.

Linux installation

Bootloader

The bad news come when working with the Windows version and trying to make it dual boot. I use Arch linux, so I tend to avoid secure boot. No problem, I said, I’ll just disable it. But HP original firmware (01.04) does not agree. It offers the options but fails to save it. But after a long series of swearwords and a firmware update (01.06) I managed to disable it.

So, Uefi should work out of the box at least…

…only if you use the option –removable in grub-install (after another ordered list of swearwords).

UPDATE It looks like some windows update likes to erase grub… So keep a USB key handy, and in case remember:

mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
mount /dev/sda2 /mnt/boot/EFI
arch-chroot /mnt
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/EFI --bootloader-id=GRUB
grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/EFI --removable

Clickpad

I know, sometimes I’m old fashioned. I still use Xorg, Wayland up to now gave me much more hassles than joy.

To get right and middle click working put in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/70-synaptics.conf:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad"
    Driver "synaptics"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        # Enable clickpad/multitouch support
        Option "ClickPad" "true"
        # Middle-button emulation is not supported
        Option "EmulateMidButtonTime" "0"
	Option     "SoftButtonAreas"  "60% 0 82% 0 40% 59% 82% 0"
EndSection

Graphics

Linux Intel graphics experience suggests putting in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
  Driver      "intel"
  Option      "TearFree" "true"
EndSection

Still no signs of tearing, so I’m still waiting to enable it.

Network?!?

I noticed some strange behaviour on the ethernet adapter (intel e1000e module). Alternatively it negotiates the link at Gigabit speed or at 10Mb/s… Disconnect and reconnect and you get the other option. This affects only the downlink speed. Still working on it… Feels like I’m not alone:

https://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg517544.html

But no joy there…

Just an horrible workaround. Run it as you like, remember it requires root permissions and mii-tool and ethtool installed (those tools seem to report different speeds, and that is the key I used to the problem detection).

#!/bin/bash
while true; do
ip link | grep enp0s31f6 | grep DOWN > /dev/null
CONNECT=$?
if [  $CONNECT -eq 1 ]; then
if [ -f /tmp/connect ]; then
true
#echo "connected and ok, doing nothing"
else
sudo ethtool enp0s31f6 | grep Speed | grep 1000 > /dev/null
ETH=$?
sudo mii-tool enp0s31f6 | grep 1000 >/dev/null
MII=$?
#echo $ETH $MII
if [ $ETH -ne $MII ]; then
  date > /tmp/checkgig
  sudo ethtool -r enp0s31f6  > /dev/null
fi
touch /tmp/connect
fi
else 
  if [ -f /tmp/connect ]; then
    rm /tmp/connect
#    echo "not connected "
  fi
fi
sleep 300
done

I simply can’t believe it. It looks like that starting from kernel 5.3 the issue has been solved. At least here on archlinux!