Ubuntu 22.04 on the HP Victus

New day, new gear. This post is about Ubuntu on the HP Victus 16-e0033nv and continues the long list of Ubuntu on laptops: Acer Nitro 5, HP ProBook, Asus VivoBook, Lenovo Thinkpad and probably others I’m forgetting about right now.

The laptop comes with Windows 11 which I used mainly for a BIOS update.

The good news is: it all works out of the box. Booting Ubuntu 22.04 from an USB stick works, wifi and webcam work immediately.

Hardware check

AMD graphics
Nvidia graphics (+ running discrete graphics)
Wifi
Ethernet
USB stick
Function keys
Speakers
Microphone
Keyboard backlight
Standby
Webcam
Touchpad (+ gestures)
Bluetooth

Things I didn’t try:

External monitor
External mouse & keyboard
Other USB devices
HDMI

Annoyances:

When playing sound through speakers or when the keyboard backlight is on, there’s a faint, high-pitched noise. It probably is related to power-saving, but I couldn’t get rid of it. Doesn’t occur under Windows. The issue is less pronounced with the amd pstate driver (see amd pstate chapter)
Power consumption is higher than under Windows 11, the laptop gets warmer and the fan works more often (see a possibly related note in the Snap chapter)

I prefer the Windows shortcut alt+shift for switching keyboard layouts:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1407560/switching-language-by-alt-shift-after-update-from-ubuntu-22-04-beta-to-release

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-input-source "['Alt_L']"
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-input-source-backward "['Shift_L']"

AMD pstate

I enabled the AMD pstate performance scaling driver: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1437358/enabling-amd-pstate-in-ubuntu-22-10

Other than upsetting powertop a bit (frequency stats are stuck at idle), it seems to reduce thermal emissions, enables proper frequency handling with cpupower and reduces audible interference from the keyboard backlight.

WLAN

Wifi is a bit unstable on the 5GHz band. There’s a repeating error message in syslog "wlo1: CTRL-EVENT-BEACON-LOSS” which almost goes away when disabling power management:

sudo iwconfig wlo1 power off

Snap

I like snap for the extra security and dependency isolation. It used to be painful to set up and run, but with Ubuntu 22.04 it works well: I am using Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird, VLC and Libreoffice in their snapped versions without major issues.

An inconspicuous little warning when running snapped applications from the console ( “/usr/share/libdrm/amdgpu.ids: : no such file or directory“) has important consequences: snapped applications don’t have access to graphics hardware acceleration. The effect is noticeable, eg. 3% CPU load when playing a video with mvp versus 30% when playing the same video with VLC.