I recently got myself a new laptop, HP Dragonfly Elitebook Max G3. Here are some impressions of the laptop and few thoughts about the Linux support for it.
TLDR version
For the busy people, here is the short summary: Linux support is good for the laptop, it is powerful enough for my development work and light, hence very portable. I had few issues with it, mainly getting the suspend to ram/resume to work, but otherwise I can recommend it. For longer description and issues I had with it, please read on.
Previous laptop
I do not upgrade laptops very often. My previous main laptop was over 3 years old, it was a Lenovo T480s. It started showing signs of failure, so before it would fail completely I decided to get a new one. I wanted a powerful, lightweight and easily portable laptop. Due to the COVID supply chain issues there were not many options available when I was browsing the local retailers. I was interested in Framework laptops, but at the time they did not deliver to my country. Previously I had been using Lenovo laptops and had been quite satisfied with them. Their Linux support has been getting better with programs like the preinstalled Linux on Lenovo. But then again they have a history of putting questionable software on their computers (see for example arstechnica article) or just search lenovo malware. So this time I decided to try other manufactor. With not many options, I decided on the HP Dragonfly Elitebook Max G3.
Hardware and Linux support
The hardware is quite nice, 32 gigs of RAM, touchscreen and pen support (pen included), 13 inch screen, videocam + shutter to hide the camera and enough CPU power for my development work. The laptop weights about 1kg, so very portable and easy to travel with.
I first installed Fedora 36 KDE Spin on the machine. I am a long time Gnome user, but I recently wanted to see how well KDE performs. Installation itself was a breeze, like it has been for years with Fedora and most things worked out of the box, like pen support, wifi and graphics. But two things did not work: the touchscreen and suspend/resume. As I searched the touchscreen issue it seemed that KDE does not yet support touchscreens, altough the pen worked fine. So I installed Gnome and switched back to the Gnome desktop environment, which supports touchscreen and pen input.
The suspend to RAM issue was a little bit trickier. I use the functionality a lot, so it was important to find a solution. After searching around and I eventually found a blog post about a similar issue on a another HP laptop: Frederik Himpe's blog post. It seems to require a firmware update. The Fedora already has fwupd installed by default so running:
# fwupdtool updateupdated the firmware. After reboot the issue was fixed and suspending to RAM worked. Though sometimes returning from suspension, the clock was wrong, it was 2 hours ahead (computer itself is in UTC time and my timezone is UTC + 2, so something related to it). Restarting the NTP-service corrected the time. There were also some strange sound issues, sometimes after resuming sound had periodic glitches and one could not enjoy listening to music or watching videos. I tried to restart pipewire for no gain, but then noticed the clock was always off in those times. Restarting the NTP-service fixed this issue as well.
After that I tested the rest of the hardware as well and everything seemed to work well: WIFI, graphics, fingerprint reader, webcam and bluetooth. Also the automatic screen rotation works when rotating the screen and putting the laptop to stand up position.
Daily usage
So after getting everything working, this laptop has performed very well and I have been very happy with it. The keyboard is okey, I mostly use external mechanical keyboards, but the laptop's keyboard is good enough for typing a full day with it. The battery has been good enough for my usage. The laptop's portability is good. The only thing I miss from the Lenovo laptops is the trackpoint.
I have noticed that I have not used much the tablet mode, meaning using the laptop with touchscreen and pen. I will try to explore it more thoroughly and write a separate post about it. The few times I have tested it, it has worked smoothly and Gnome has a good support for touchscreen and pen usage.