On 11/02/2017 09:29 AM, Sorin Srbu wrote: > Hello all, > > I'm looking into getting HP laptops for our department running CentOS 7. > > Last time I checked this was some five or so years ago, and when I look at > https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops, nothing much seems to have happened > since. > > At that time, I had to give up CentOS on laptops, as both Wi-Fi and graphics > wasn't too well supported with CentOS 5 and 6. > Is the situation better now with CentOS 7? > > We're only allowed to buy the HP, Dell and Apple brands here at this > university, so what I'm looking at is basically HP. Apple is not of interest > because of their pricing. > All our desktops and laptops are HP's running Windows 7 and 10, and they > work fine. > We do have some Dells, but only in the server area. > Currently all our CentOS 6 and 7 workstations are custom built OEMs used for > molecular modelling, but are now getting rather long in the tooth. > I have a laptop at the office as a backup, running Ubuntu 16 LTS, as that > was the only thing that found all the hardware properly at the time. > However, I'd rather not go down that particular road for various reasons. > > The thing that interests me first and foremost is whether the latest CentOS > 7 iteration will install right out of the box with all hardware properly > detected, no manual compiling of drivers or jumping through hoops to _maybe_ > getting stuff to work with eg a HP Elitebook 850 G4. > > Anybody care to chime in with a comment or hint on the laptop situation > and-or their experiences? > For two years now I've been semi-happily using an HP Envy with the high-end Nvidia graphics card. Installing CentOS7, everything worked out of box except the wifi. The problem there was due to the drivers requiring a v.3.5 kernel which centos doesn't yet have. There were some very occasional glitches in the video, but subsequent upgrades to the nvidia drivers eventually fixed those. Audio worked initially, but after installing vlc I've had problems which I haven't been able to track down, so the sound with some apps just doesn't work. Notably, anything audio through firefox doesn't work except that which uses flashplayer. Audacity and vlc work just fine. The body of the laptop is solid, made mostly out of carbon fiber... it seemed like it's bullet-proof. The pop-out DVD tray I got is really flimsy, so must be handled quite gingerly. I've read that it's been upgraded by HP to more solid version in more recent incarnations of the Envy. I've never used the bluetooth, so I can't testify to how well that works, but I've never seen/read any complaints about it, so I'd assume it works. Of the six or more laptops I've owned in my life, the keyboard of this one has been absolutely the most difficult one to get used to. It seems that if I don't hit a key square in the middle of the key, that character doesn't make it to the screen. Same failure if I press the key too hard. This craps on my typing speed immensely, I used to type at over 100 words/minute, but I'm now down to less than half that... sucks big time. It's nice that it has a big touchpad and I use it all the time. Only very seldom to I plug in a usb mouse (e.g., in Blender). But it's way too easy to accidently touch the touchpad, resulting in all kinds of random mayhem. So I modified some code I found to disable/enable the touchpad and mapped that code to [Ctrl-`] so that it operates as a toggle. Problem therewith nicely solved. Talking with folks on a suse list about the sound problem, I learned that they have have no sound problems with there and, further, my problem might be a messed up packman stack... whatever that is. Suse also has a much higher kernel version than we do in centos, so switching over to suse is in the works. That's sad because I've been a happy RH/centos guy for a long time. Hope this review is helpful.