This is a more fleshed-out review of my new HP Omen laptop. To see my initial impressions, read this post.

In case you forgot, here's the specs:

• ryzen 7 6800h
• radeon rx 6650m (8GB)
• 16GB DDR5-4800
• 512GB SSD
• 1440p 165hz display
• mediatek mt7922

setup

After disabling Secure Boot, which chucked me into a bitlocker recovery prompt for the previous windows installation, I nuked the drive, installed Arch with disk encryption on the machine, then reinstalled windows 11 for a dual-boot setup. I am using systemd-boot, and windows shares the ESP with linux.

the good

All the points from the initial impressions post still hold as well.

• The laptop stays pretty cool. (My visual judgement of the cooling system was apparently spot-on.) On battery power and under low load, it completely shuts off one of the two fans, and still idles around 30C¹. If you pick up some load, it will begrudgingly spin up the other fan after a while (on battery, that is). Plugged in, it's much more happy to turn up that second fan. It throttles at like 55Cish on battery but as soon as you plug it in it'll jump to like 75 before the fans really kick in. Overall I feel pretty good about it.
• Even when the machine gets hot, no user-facing part of it actually heats up much. The area above the keyboard gets pleasantly warm and that's about it. One of my friends has a Razer laptop and when it gets hot, the top half of the keyboard becomes almost uncomfortable to use.
• The sound quality is alright from the speakers
• Most of the hardware worked out-of-the-box with Linux, with a notable exception that I will discuss later.
• The display looks good. Going back to my 24" 1080p desktop monitors after looking at this 1440p 16" thing makes me feel like my eyes have gone bad. It's also got seemingly a lot of available brightness.
• The entire computer can be taken apart with one screwdriver. Sure, you have to spudge the backplate off, but literally every single screw I saw inside was the same size phillips drive. Also, the battery is not glued down, the ram and SSD is upgradeable, and there's an entire extra SSD slot.

so pretty...

the less good

Once again previous ones hold true.

• The colors might be kind of funny on the display. I should probably calibrate them but that's a whole can of worms I didn't want to get into.
• Windows 11's installation medium seemingly lacks the driver for the wifi card. It was unable to do anything related to wifi until completely installed, which was just a minor inconvenience because I have ethernet, but I wouldn't buy a laptop with only an mt792(1|2) wifi thingy in it.
• The charging port on the back actually gets in the way a little bit if you are, say, sitting on a couch with the laptop on your actual lap. It's nice if the machine is on a desk, though.
• The dedicated HP Omen Software Opener key does not emit a keycode, so I can't bind it to anything. It just sits there wasting space.
• From 2100-2500ish RPM both fans produce a little bit of fan noise. Once they get up higher the air noise cancels it out, which is why I didn't notice. The fan noise is not too much, but it's somewhat annoying.

the actual bad this time

Here we go.

• This is probably specific to my machine, but the left click on the trackpad makes two clicking sounds for some reason, and it drives me nuts. I've actually forcibly converted myself to tap-clicking to avoid it.
• Remember how I lauded the giant trackpad? well, I keep accidentally activating it with my palm/wrist while typing. I can't configure the pressure sensitivity with libinput because the device doesn't support it.
• Time for the exception I mentioned earlier. Linux has had a driver for MT792(1|2) since like 5.15 or so. The wifi worked fine OOTB. HOWEVER. The people who made the actual MT7922 part installed in my machine changed the vendor ID of the bluetooth part, I guess. It's not been added to the Linux kernel yet as a valid MT7921e-drivable device ID, so the kernel tries to treat it like a generic device, which predictably fails. I didn't find anybody online with the same vendor ID, so I just made a 3-line kernel patch to add it to the list of MT7921e devices. While this does make me compile the kernel myself, I come from gentoo-land so I don't mind too much. Adding that was all that was necessary to get bluetooth working. I don't want to go through all of the work to submit it to the actual kernel, and I'm also afraid of the kernel devs, and someone might already have submitted it and I just didn't see and it hasn't landed yet, etc etc etc. In any case, I'm sure somebody better than me will get around to upstreaming a patch to make this device work. Also, here it is, if you're curious (yes, it's this simple). I figured out the ID from the inxi tool which is excellent.

--- a/drivers/bluetooth/btusb.c
+++ b/drivers/bluetooth/btusb.c
@@ -511,6 +511,9 @@ static const struct usb_device_id blacklist_table[] = {
 	{ USB_DEVICE(0x0489, 0xe0e2), .driver_info = BTUSB_MEDIATEK |
 						    BTUSB_WIDEBAND_SPEECH |
 						    BTUSB_VALID_LE_STATES },
+	{ USB_DEVICE(0x0489, 0xe0e0), .driver_info = BTUSB_MEDIATEK |
+						    BTUSB_WIDEBAND_SPEECH |
+						    BTUSB_VALID_LE_STATES },
 
 	/* Additional Realtek 8723AE Bluetooth devices */
 	{ USB_DEVICE(0x0930, 0x021d), .driver_info = BTUSB_REALTEK },

update: kernel 6.1 (i think) fixes this

linux support

The linux support on this machine is... okay. It has some weird problems which I believe mostly stem from the mt7922, just since it's fairly new and running on a driver for an mt7921. There's supposedly drivers in linux for most or all of the wmi stuff that hp supports so I just have to use them. Currently starting on reverse-engineering the windows hp command center software to see what it's up to, might reimplement some of it if i'm feeling funny and have some free time. I started out trying to figure out how to control the fans (since the default bios fan control is stupid and wrong) without using windows thingy and here we are.

the overall

I'm really happy with this thing overall. Sure, it has some weird problems, and I can't say I recommend it for a lot of Linux use, but if you're willing to poke at the kernel then why not. For windows users it's probably pretty great. Thing has great build quality, great performance, good enough battery life, screen is nice, lots of connectivity. 4/5.