System 76 and HP have LET THEIR POWERS COMBINE to create the HP Dev One, an out of the box Linux laptop powered by System 76’s Pop!_OS. Disclosure: I did receive a review unit and have subsequently purchased a personal unit for myself; I actually purchased two units, but more on that later. Ringing up at a reasonable $1099, the Dev One is aggressively priced compared to other Linux out-of-the-box machines and its likely near competition the MacBook Pro. It’s important to note that HP / System 76 are targeting this model at developers, not the wider market and also not gamers. There’s been a good deal of fair debate online (think Hacker News & Reddit) about what really makes this a developer laptop. My take is a little banal – it doesn’t really matter and it’s likely more them trying to communicate who they feel ought to consider purchasing this machine; in other words, folks who might be look at the Apple options or other Linux machines, which it seems likely are in large part developers.
For that money you get some pretty decent specs and I’d argue that for it’s price-point, the Dev One punches a bit above its weight. The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U is really the star of the show here offering great performance and in my experience some of the best battery life that I’ve seen on a Linux laptop; this is even more impressive when you take into account the 1000 nits screen. 
The built in 16GB of RAM cannot be upgraded at the time of purchase. That’s a bit of a bummer if you’re anything like me and don’t really want to get your paws in the guts of the machine, but as far as Laptops I’ve owned over the years the One is far more user serviceable than any of them; in fact, I found it easier to open than any of the previous System 76 machines I’ve owned including two generations of the Oryx, the Lemur, two generations of Galago and the Pangolin; sounds like I might have a System 76 problem! With that said in my day to day workflow of Zoom Hell, Slack sundering, Python charming in VS Code and Ruby mining it’s plenty fast enough. With that said, go ahead and pop some more RAM in there if you need it. I actually plan to myself because I can’t escape the gravitational pull of needing a Windows 10 VM for some legacy Windows desktop software that I support.
While I know it’s not target at gamers that doesn’t mean I didn’t try! I’ll be the first to admit I am not a hardcode AAA gamer. I tend to play (read fail at) XCOM and Civilization VI as well as a number of 2D indie games and retro games either natively or more often via Steam Proton or Lutris. For all my needs it worked fine and looked good. Again, that’s nowhere near a rigorous gaming test, but if you’re like me a casual sort of in the airport lounge gamer, then you’ll be just fine.
For Developers? Well, despite my sincere belief that it’s mostly a market segmentation strategy, there are a few things worth pointing out. The most obvious being Pop!_OS. Pop has a keyboard-centric navigation paradigm that also incorporates VIM keyboard shortcuts that will feel natural to any developer coming from another Linux or macOS system. While this is not a review of Pop!_OS, I’d once again like to remind you that you should be using the full disk encryption! Things get lost in airports, don’t take the risk of also compromising your data.
So, I bought two, but… I returned one. The reason for that is USB-C charging died on the first unit I bought. That did not happen on the review unit and I’ve made a survey of other early buyers and it seems to have been just me. And no, I didn’t spill anything on it ;). HP was good about offering an exchange, but Coder Radio listeners will know that I can be a bit ummm… mercurial.
I ended up opting to just return the machine and purchase a new unit. I should also add that some of the value add here is that System 76 is working shoulder-to-shoulder with HP and it shows. They were fast and patient even to a customer who was being a bit of a donkey. I should also note the shipping on purchases is two fast 24-48 business hours; my suspicion is that this is at least part of the reason you can’t customize the build. The only other thing that stood out to me as kind of odd given the forward-looking nature of the Dev One is that it has a barrel charging as well as UBS-C. Now, my experience has been that the barrel charger is significantly faster than either USB-C port, so that’s a feature. However, I’d love to see a revised model that leaned into USB-4 via the USB-C form-factor; I am aware that to many potential Dev One customers the variety of ports is a feature rather than a bug and admittedly this is probably more than a little because I have been forced into the USB-C lifestyle by my cornucopia of Apples.
Bottom line, the HP Dev One is a great machine for Linux users / enthusiasts. It’s a strong buy recommendation. In fact, it’s my current daily driver and will be the standard issue machine for my company The Mad Botter INC for at least this year. I’m more than happy to answer any questions or look at any specific aspects of the device, just reach out to me on Twitter. Cheers! 
