I bought an HP laptop (envy 13 ah0003-na) and had some troubles making it work with Linux, but I managed to get it running. I'm sharing here what I did.
DISCLAIMER: This worked for me, and I can not guarantee it will work for you. Use at your own risk.
I tried to install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and the installer entered a boot loop (from a quick try, the Ubuntu 18.10 installer had solved that, but I wanted to install an LTS version and 18.04 is the most recent at the time of writing this). It's possible to sidestep that by editing the GRUB command line and adding the following kernel parameter (See https://askubuntu.com/questions/19486/how-do-i-add-a-kernel-boot-parameter for details):
acpi_osi=""
(I added this after the quiet splash kernel options)
Once you complete your install, I found the same boot crash (because the
installed system requires the same change in boot parameters). To be able to
boot each time I still needed to take the same steps that I did with the
installer (editing the grub kernel command line). To make the
change permanent, I added the parameters to /etc/default/grub. After playing
a bit I found that the best setup is a slightly different kernel command line:
$ sudo nano /etc/default/grub
There I edited the line that looks like
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
And changed it to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=! acpi_osi=\"Windows 2009\""
After that I saved, reinstalled with
$ sudo update-grub
And then I was able to reboot all time
The touchscreen was not working after boot. This seems to be caused by some slight bugs/incompatibilities between the ACPI code (some hardware description bultin with the laptop) and the Linux ACPI implementation. To fix that I needed to make an alternative ACPI code and load that instead of the one included with the laptop.
WARNING: this probably may not work if your laptop is even a single bit different to mine hardware-wise, or even if it has a different BIOS version (at the time of writing this, mine has version F.16-09/26/2018).
So I installed the ACPI code compiler:
$ sudo apt install acpica-tools
And then decompiled and edited my current laptop ACPI code, resulting on the source files that are in this repo. I then can compile those going to a clone of this repo and running:
$ make
$ make install
The alter will require your root password. This added a dsdt.aml file in
/boot, which contains the updated and compiled ACPI code. This code needs
to be loaded by the grubloader, but it's not a linux kernel option; this
requires an extra line in the bootloader (right after the linux ... line)
saying
acpi /boot/dsdt.aml
You can trying editing the grub2 command line again, and you may have a working touchscreen.
Note: This method is based off my version of grub-common (2.02-2ubuntu8.9) and may break if you have a different version
Replace your existing /etc/grub.d/10_linux file with the grub/10_linux file in this repo.
Then re-run update-grub and reboot.
If your version of grub-common is different, Grub Customizer can also be used.
First, right-click on the boot option for Ubuntu and select edit:
Then, insert the line acpi /boot/dsdt.aml below the line starting with linux.
Click Ok to close the window.
Important:
Grub Customizer will try and remove quoation marks from kernel parameters. This will cause update-grub to fail.
To prevent this, go to the General Settings tab.
Then, re-add any lost quotation marks:
You will need to re-add the quotation marks any time you make changes in Grub Customizer.
Finally, click the Save button in the top left to make your changes permanent.