It may be specific to the model I own. I have an Envy 15, with i7 CPU, 1080p display, ATI+Intel graphics, 8GB of RAM, etc. Cost about $1350, I think. I'm happy yours is holding up OK, though. It was the highest end and highest resolution laptop they had at Fry's when I needed a new laptop on short notice, so I bought it with little research.

Problems I've had:

Dead pixels. New ones have sprung up just in the past couple months. I think it has 7 now (in two clusters).

Heat. Damned thing runs hot enough to literally burn my legs. It has "Cool Sense", which allows you to choose between "Slow enough to where you have to take coffee breaks between opening or closing new tabs." and "Oh gods, why am I on fire?" So, I disabled Cool Sense. It made the computer vastly slower than the one it replaced (and the one before that one).

Keyboard is truly awful. I'm a great typist, but this keyboard slows me down, and misses strokes if they aren't really firm. Also, if you type really fast, it'll sometimes randomly insert the number "6". Why 6? I don't know. It's just this thing it does.

The faux metal coating began discoloring within a couple of weeks or purchase. I'm an obsessive hand washer, and I've never had this problem with any other lappy. This one just sucks at looking good. I've never put stickers on a laptop before, because I like a shiny new looking laptop...this laptop looked like crap so quickly, that I put stickers all over it to cover the crappiness.

Fans makes a horrible racket for a few minutes when returning from sleep or booting. I have no pets, and I don't smoke, so my house is not very dusty or plagued by particulates. I've opened it up to try to clean it and blown it out with compressed air, but no apparent dust was present. The fans are just crappy and noisy.

The headphone jacks are janky. I can mostly only get one channel out of them. I use this laptop for movie screenings (my audiovisual company does outdoor screenings on a pretty large scale; sometimes for 1000+ people), and had to buy a new USB audio interface to get reliable sound output. The USB interface is a minor expense in a $25,000 setup, but it's a nuisance to not have a decent audio output on a high end laptop that claims to be good for audio. Also, the Dre Beats filter is awful; I recommend disabling it on any device that has it.

The trackpad (a fancy multitouch thing) has been really...umm...touchy. For most of it's life with me. It's gotten solid under Linux (or I've gotten used to it, when others use my machine they are startled by the jumpiness of the touchpad; I've mostly acclimated to treating it with kid gloves). Under Windows it is still really bad. Typing on the keyboard can make the pointer jump and trigger a click, so focus can shift without warning while typing. I've never been able to adjust this away, and it is infuriating and makes working under Windows on this machine a serious burden.

It has begun to die. Every few days the caps lock light will flash ominously, which, according to the documentation means it needs to be serviced. I haven't figured out what, specifically, is wrong with it, but since it's my primary computer, I'm loathe to be without it. Sometimes it goes away after sleeping or rebooting, sometimes it stays on for days. Again, I've had it for a little over a year. Every other lappy I've owned has lasted 4 years or more. This laptop is a sad story.

Maybe I got a lemon. I wish I'd taken it back during the return period, but I needed a machine to work on...so, it ended up staying with me. I won't make the mistake of buying another HP.

As for Linux compatibility, it's actually really good, except for sound (only one set of speakers works, so it is really quiet under Linux, and since head phone jacks are janky, I can't really even use headphones effectively). It's got a lot of Intel components with Open Source drivers. The ATI drivers, both Open Source and proprietary work OK, though I prefer the seamless experience of the Intel drivers.