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Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

I have a Japanese Toshiba KIRA V63 (only sold in Japan, for some stupid reason). It's a great machine and quite cheap for it's specs. I bought it for battery life (I can do a whole day of programming on a single charge in Linux), but it has good performance as well. I've been very pleasantly surprised at how well the Intel 5200U has performed. Also at only 1.2 kg, I can easily stick it in my bag and carry it with me anywhere I go.

I've seen on the news that Toshiba plans to shut down its laptop division in the near future. Some people have told me that it isn't 100% for sure, so I'm hanging on to some hope. I've been looking at offerings of other Japanese makers (I live in Japan) and there is nothing else comparable. I'm not sure what I'll do when I need to replace this one. Toshiba has been my go to maker for the last 10 years or so because virtually everything they make "just works" on Linux.

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>Toshiba has been my go to maker for the last 10 years or so because virtually everything they make "just works" on Linux.

This is honestly a pretty shocking statement for me, because Toshiba has long been my go-to example for the worst-case scenario of installing Linux on laptops. I have never once had a Toshiba laptop that "just worked" out of the box with Linux. Whether it was power management, display drivers, or wifi, there was always something that was broken out of the box and needed to be fixed. Heck, I have a Toshiba A305 for which Linux still doesn't have proper power management drivers, even though the laptop is about a decade old.

When people ask me about Linux on laptops, I say that they should go with either Lenovos or (more lately) the new Dell XPS models. Never Sony, never Toshiba. I've never heard of anyone having a good experience installing Linux on laptops made by those two manufacturers.

Toshiba was my first laptop back in 1999.

One of the reasons I went with them was that besides being famous for making good laptops, was that they had a dedicated Linux web site and forum for supporting Linux on their laptops.

While most other OEMs couldn't care less.

Extra info as I cannot edit my comment any longer.

They still have it, here is the German version

http://www.toshiba.de/generic/np-linux-support/

Interestingly, my first Toshiba laptop was whatever the Canadian equivalent of the A205 was in 2007. No problems other than it needed a custom driver for the wifi (which eventually made its way into the kernel).

Toshiba used to maintain a webpage on their Japanese site that listed what worked and what didn't in Linux for all of their models. It also listed any custom drivers that it might need. It's the reason I switched to Toshiba originally. Unfortunately, it does not seem to be there any more (or I can't find it). Last time I looked at it, every single modern model had no problems. When I bought the K63, the trackpad didn't work properly (I bought it days after it was first released), but they said that a driver was being updated on that page. Sure enough, about 2 months later it was fine.

It's a moot point now I suppose since they are apparently leaving the business.

May be an outlier but i'm running Arch linux on a Sony Vaio Pro 13 and it's nearly perferct. I put the BIOS into legacy mode though.

I had a Toshiba Tecra M11-17z and it worked flawlessly with Linux. Before I bought it, I made sure that the Wifi, Graphics etc were Intel and not some iffy RealTek/Broadcom nonsense.

The first boot after it arrived (to check it was working before I installed Arch) took an hour, it downloaded updates to the vast array of crapware that came bundled and did all sorts of other 'customisations', truly awful. Look at the bundled software list on the link below, it actually makes me feel sorry for Microsoft.

http://www.toshiba.co.uk/discontinued-products/tecra-m11-17z...

Similar experience here. They are the Toyotas of laptops.

My little Toshiba has been very reliable, runs Linux perfectly.

I would never buy anything else so I hope they manage to restructure so their talent survives. It is increasingly difficult to get quality products these days. More and more it is a choice between constantly breaking crap and unaffordable. It's in cars, houses, everything.

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