Linux drivers on HP Envy Spectre x360 15z

[AHahn]

Hello,
I am planning on purchasing an HP Spectre Envy 15z (The one with the Ryzen chip) and was wondering about Wacom drivers for it.

I am under the impression that I will need to run Kernel 4.15 and use the AMDGPU drivers. I am also under the impression that the touch screen will not work out of box.

Can anyone tell me if the team over at HP is working on driver support for this laptop?
Are there any community solutions for this yet?

[WAWood]

@AHahn

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

HP only warranties their PCs for usage with the OS that comes preinstalled.  IF you replace that or add a different OS, then you assume full responsibility for maintaining that other OS -- as HP then provides no assistance on that.
 
Win10 PCs nearly all use UEFI and that poses special problems for installing Linux distros. Here is a thread from the Ubuntu Forums that describes the issues you will face:  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2147295
 
Your best bet for Linux support, since HP does not provide Linux drivers, is to contact the support forum for the Linux distro you are trying to install.

[PortlandiaIT]

That thread is really old.  Current Ubuntu 16 will install out of the box on UEFI systems.  I have several machines with UEFI.  It can get a bit tricky if you want to dual-boot between Windows and Linux on a UEFI system but it's quite doable.

In general HP (and other vencors) only write drivers for RedHat-based releases not Debian based releases.

[AHahn]

Im sorry, what thread are you reffering to?
I am not looking to dual boot at all, I just want to make sure that the touchscreen will work.
To be clear, I am confident that if some distro has figured it out I can find the fix and apply it to the distro that I run.

Do you have experience with this model? I would love to hear about how it runs on any linux distro.

[PortlandiaIT]

I was referring to the UEFI thread the prior poster linked to.  I did not want to let that stand since the Linux community has worked very hard to get UEFI and secure boot working with Linux, and in fact Microsoft required anyone offering a machine with Secure Boot on it to insert a switch in BIOS to disable it - specifically so that older OSes would boot on these machines - or they would not certify the hardware.

As I said, HP (and Dell and others) only release commercial drivers for RedHat.  In the case of consumer devices like the Envy you mentioned, they don't generally supply Linux drivers EVER.  This is common knowledge so you shouldn't even be asking if HP would be working on Linux drivers because a) they don't on consumer gear and b) on the business gear they do supply linux drivers on they are NOT debian-based drivers.

Now will it work - well this link seems to indicate a distro of linux has a working touchscreen with a x360:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/600528/is-ubuntu-compatible-with-the-hp-spectre-x360

I  can't tell you if it's the same x360 but I would bet they all use the same touchscreen hardware.

I would suggest that in this instance you need to take a leap of faith.  My guess is if you got one of these and booted Ubuntu on it without even bothering to turn off UEFI boot in the BIOS it would work out of the box with everything you wanted.  You can boot Ubuntu without touching the disk of the 2-in-1 and run Linux of the USB stick and if it doesen't work then return it.  You are then out the shipping but that's minor compared to the machine cost.

Good luck and post back here with your results.

[AHahn]

Thanks!


I have purchased the laptop and will try to install Arch on it.
Hopefully documenting the process will help the next person in line who runs a foul of HP's lack of linux support.
Best case scenario I have a working lapotp, worst case scenario whatever relevant open source driver projects get information about this machine so I guess win-win!

[PortlandiaIT]

Well, you could always run HyperV and run Linux as a guest OS.  I do that myself with Android x86 and Ubuntu on 10 pro, I run Android Studio on Ubuntu under HyperV and Android x86 under another Hyper V session for testing the app.  I started doing that in an Android programming class a few years ago just to be a smartass and found it to be pretty convenient.  (I also have another system running Ubuntu with VirtualBox on that and a Windows guest on VB so I'm guilty of sacriledge in either community 🙂

[AHahn]

Much of the software I use doesnt work very well on windows (emacs, kdevelop, gdb, various command line) and having a butchered CLI environment would set me back in my coursework. Also I find Microsoft to be a very unethical company.

I think I will just try and run Linux bare metal. Ill report back how it goes when I am finished. (laptop has not arrived yet)

[PortlandiaIT]

The only CLI environment worth messing with under Windows is PowerShell but it is so alien few want to invest the time in learning it.  But in the future that's going to be the only way to do most advanced things on Windows.

Microsoft's ethics started improving once Gates and Ballmer left the company. 🙂  But we really lost our chance with them years ago, they should have been broken up into an apps and an OS company under the Department of Justice lawsuit.

Unfortunately the animosity between Windows and Unix predates Windows, it dates back to Digital Equipment Corporation  vs ATT/Bell Labs.    DEC produced VMS,  ATT produced System V Unix and BSD scampered away from ATT into the university system.  When Microsoft decided to get into real operating systems their original idea was to buy SCO and get into Xenix.  They worked with SCO to produce a unix for the Apple Lisa, and later owned a significant chunk of SCO.

The problem was when Microsoft decided to write their own real OS  (preemptive multitasking, not the glorified program loader named DOS) they hired the top guy away from DEC to do it.  He hated Unix and went on a rampage to remove every trace of POSIX and Unix from any Microsoft operating system products he could - and went on to produce Windows NT which was actually a ripoff of much of VMS.

And that then set the stage.  VMS comes at OSs from a completely different direction than Unix, it's just not possible to ever combine the two.  And despite what most people think, Linux is Unix in everything but the name, the only difference is the kernel but everything else is ripped off from BSD, Next, and whatever other Unix project out there that they find interesting code from.

If the VMS/Unix schism hadn't happened between ATT and DEC then Windows wouldn't exist and we would all be running different commercial versions of System V, from Microsoft, Apple, RedHat, and so forth, with a big "complete OSS" community running 100% free Unix kernels.

But, sadly, it was not to be.  In 100 years graduate students will be writing thesis'es about how much talent and programming effort was wasted in the dawn of the computer industry due to religious wars over OSes but today, all we have are the zealots.

[AHahn]

Thanks for the history lesson, as a student with no exposure to VMS I had no clue where windows DNA came from.
I just dont want to support a company that embeds ads into all layers of the user's desktop, forces people to switch System versions against their will, and has hostile views toward their employees...

At the moment my machine is in shipping, currently trying to find a way to preload an arch iso with the latest amd staging kernel compiled from git. Hopefully having the latest AMD patches will help with hardware compatibility.