HP To Begin Preloading Ubuntu 20.04 On Select Laptops Paired With Data Science Stack

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HP To Begin Preloading Ubuntu 20.04 On Select Laptops Paired With Data Science Stack

HP today announced a new Ubuntu Linux offering for select mobile workstations and notebooks in the form of the "Z by HP Data Science Software" package. This isn't just pre-loading the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS OEM version on the notebook but calling it a day, rather it's been pre-loaded as well with a variety of data science software packages...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HP-Z-Data-Science-Ubuntu-Pre

[duby229]

It seems to me like HP identified a group of users they feel they can make a profit from. The software packages and the hardware configurations all target a pre-existing market that HP probably feels like they are missing out on... The problem that I see with this is that in HP's apparent view "Data Science Software = Cuda"... That's definitely not good...

[hajj_3]

If people are going to be using those programs they can probably download them themselves very easily. People who don't want them will have to uninstall them, sounds like a bad idea to me.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I'm not so sure HP think "Data Science Software = CUDA" as much as "most people use Tensorflow/Keras with CUDA"? And while ROCm is slowly becoming an option, from my understanding it's still quite fussy to set up. HP won't want to offer support for that.

That said, I'll install what I want, thanks, and Visual Studio Code and PyCharm aren't it.

[scratchi]

If people are going to be using those programs they can probably download them themselves very easily. People who don't want them will have to uninstall them, sounds like a bad idea to me.

Yea,I agree. If we're talking about Data Scientists, these are usually very technical people that want their the software on their workstations tweaked for specific workloads. They tend to pick VSCode OR PyCharm; rarely will they need/want both. They work either with PyTorch OR Tensorflow, rarely both (unless they are assigned to multiple projects that use different stacks; not sure if that happens frequently). And they'll configure things just the way they like it which can vary widely between developers and the projects they work on. Throwing every IDE and every trendy Framework into a single image with default settings and trying to push it into this market, won't really impress anyone and probably won't sell.

Don't get my wrong, I'm happy that HP is pushing Linux. But they should just give us a regular Ubuntu installation and not bloat it up with a bunch of packages one can easily install and configure ourselves.

[DKJones]

Hadn't really thought about the data science packages not being what data scientists want, but as long as these sell that's good for Linux.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Hadn't really thought about the data science packages not being what data scientists want, but as long as these sell that's good for Linux.

I think the danger is that the real power users already know what they want (and as scratchi said, once established in one ecosystem won't switch without good reason) so throwing every option on by default is going to just slow them down. I don't want unnecessary cruft on my systems, so would spend time uninstalling all the stuff I would never use. At that point, the question becomes what takes longer - installing from scratch on a "blank slate" OS, or removing all the nonsense I don't want? I've discovered that it's usually uninstalling stuff (neatly) that takes longer...

There might be the argument for these for students, but students will usually learn whatever their advisors tell them to learn, so it will depend on the lab.

It would make more sense to just have Ubuntu 20.04 and CUDA already installed, perhaps with a script at first boot to ask, "Do you want this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this or this installed? Or do you want to do it yourself?"

[dylanmtaylor]

Would love to see vanilla Linux preloaded and certified on their whole range, but this is better than nothing

[duby229]

I'm not so sure HP think "Data Science Software = CUDA" as much as "most people use Tensorflow/Keras with CUDA"? And while ROCm is slowly becoming an option, from my understanding it's still quite fussy to set up. HP won't want to offer support for that.

That said, I'll install what I want, thanks, and Visual Studio Code and PyCharm aren't it.

Yeah, I can totally agree with you. Despite what HP may or may not think, its totally up to AMD to get their alternative up to par with Cuda. Whether anyone likes it or not Cuda has become a defacto standard.

EDIT: Maybe I'm talking out my ass here, but... I think AMD needs to rethink ROCm... It needs HIP to be a complete drop in replacement for Cuda -AND- it needs a complete CyCL implementation which should be the focus above and beyond HIP -AND- it needs to be made vendor neutral so Intel and Nouveau can upstream drivers and share infrastructure development.

[torsionbar28]

Would love to see vanilla Linux preloaded and certified on their whole range, but this is better than nothing

What is "vanilla linux" and where does one download this OS from? Last time I checked, Linux was only a kernel, and to have a fully featured OS you must select a distribution. FYI Ubuntu is one of the more popular ones for a client pc use case.