Installing Ubuntu on a HP Pavilion laptop
So I decided to install Ubuntu on my daughter’s new laptop, more specifically an HP Pavilion. The choice of this particular laptop was because it looked nice, and had good specs for the money. It was first after the purchase I read all the complaints people have about the weird UEFI implementation on HP laptops. So I started the install process with some worries.
Reading on various forums, people seemed to have been doing all sorts of strange things to be able to install Ubuntu on HP laptops, including modifying the UEFI setup, changing the BIOS, and so on. I recall that on my Lenovo laptop I had to work quite a bit to turn off all the fancy auto-Windows-stuff.
I am not sure if HP has changed something recently or not, but the final procedure was super-easy: I just hit the F9 button on startup and got a regular “old-school” boot selector. Here I chose the USB drive, and the Ubuntu installer fired up.
I have installed Linux (primarily various Ubuntu versions) on several laptops over the years, and it is very seldom that I get into problems with drivers. Also this time, things went smoothly; everything worked perfectly right after the install. I think it is crucial to continue repeating this message because I still hear people saying that it is tricky to get Ubuntu to play with different hardware. True, there used to be driver issues some years ago, but I haven’t experienced that in five years or so.