Two things that carry negative sentiment in relation to HP:

HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010, stumbled with a mobile product launch that was killed without much runway or developer investment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270709 (article archived: https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1jxp06mns) - This no doubt soured people who cared about Palm.

HP were known for carrying Intel's Itanium business, for which few tech people have nostalgia for (the second hand market prices have always been eye-watering too), compared to the older PA-RISC line.

I'll agree their consumer/business laptops were always been perfectly usable and long lasting. I dumpster dived an excellent condition pentium 3 laptop from a HP Office that was probably thrown out because of a password locked BIOS (which was not resettable by battery removal, only by getting access to someone who had the bios password serial->keygen tool). It was a great daily driver with Debian, and wifi worked fine with ndiswrapper.