I bought this must’ve been 2016. It was a bad move from the get-go, because the hard disk is only 32Gb. And it had Windows 10, and 32Gb is only just enough to get Windows on. Pretty soon I had to use an outboard hard drive to be able to update windows, and by about 2019 even that didn’t work. It’s a shame, because it’s otherwise serviceable, but totally non-upgradeable – the ‘hard drive’ is an eMMC soldered to the board. It lasted me three years. I did like the light weight and silent operation, but the overall gutless performance and slower and slower startup was bad.
I could use a linux laptop
I had been tinkering with a Raspberry Pi4 for amateur radio field use, but wrangling a Pi in the field for things like SOTA is a mess, because a Pi plus all the odds and sods you need to make it work is a collection of parts flying in loose formation, and unlike a DC3 they don’t always work well together. It’s bad enough connecting the computer to the radio via analogue audio connectors 1, having to connect the Pi plus screen to a Bluetooth keyboard plus some sort of battery to USB-C power contraption gets a bit much in the field although it all works fine on the bench. I had already run the FLdigi and WSJT-X software on the HP Stream in Windows so I knew it was capable of decent performance, better than the Pi4 which struggles a bit to decode WSJT-X in a reasonable time.
However, I had heard bad things about trying Linux on the HP stream, because the Wifi card is very proprietary. The Ubuntu drivers seem to have fixed that now
It was surprisingly easy to load once I quit trying to install on the UEFI BIOS. I uses Xubuntu LTS 20.04, downloading the iso and putting this onto a USB stick using balenaEtcher. I found the install instructions for Xubuntu hard to find and sketchy, but they are good enough to feature this hint
If you don’t already know how to install Xubuntu, then please read this great tutorial, which applies as much to Xubuntu as to Ubuntu.
which is indeed great, and took me from there. But first I had to switch off the UEFI BIOS. It’s not that obvious to me what advantage UEFI gives me with a machine with a whopping 32Gb of disk space which is far from the 2Tb limit UEFI is supposed to fix, so legacy is fine with me.
A disadvantage of linux on a laptop, apart from the general gangly geeky oddballness of linux on the desktop as opposed to on the server is battery life is not optimised so well.