Hi Zachary, I have an HP laptop as well, and I think the problem you're facing is that neither HP nor Windows are good EFI citizens. On the HP laptop that I have, for instance, the EFI boot manager does not respect any global NVRAM variables except for BootNext. Default, BootOrder etc. are all ignored (I edited them using the efibootmgr tool on Arch, so it wasn't Windows that changed them back). In addition, it seems to be hardcoded to only boot the windows boot manager.
The only workaround I was able to find was to physically move around the .efi files in the EFI partition. I renamed the windows EFI application - $EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi by default, replaced it with the systemd-boot bootx64.efi (as in the last section of the wiki article [1]) and then added an entry to systemd-boot to boot Windows from its new, renamed, application path. This shouldn't lock you out of Windows, but it is also easily reversed in case something goes wrong. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#UEFI_boot_loader_does_not_show_up_in_firmware_menu Murari