Anyone have user experience with Toshiba Satellite laptops?

brent

iroylearner111 Tuxedo, Framework exceptions??

what do you mean? ms framework?

brent

she gets the primed newer satellite--windows is her comfort zone and will be her daily driver. it's still fat as a hippo--it's so fat it needs liposuction. wonder if she'd be better off with the older satellite? it's lean as hell--no toshiba garbage at all--someone did a pure WIN install on the old one. no WIN crap on it like spotify/xbox/amazon etc...

the old satellite was going to get Solus but it only has 4GB and Solus recs 8+..might go with my man-crush Alpine but another day. I don't use laptops. yet, so back in the box.

Dear Diary, I will be back.

BuzzPCSOS

brent if you must use windows and want a faster machine then here is the place to go.
Use the command line like the readme says and read a little on what your actions may do. This kills loads of telemetry without breaking Windows and returns a generally better experience. Use this utility to get rid of Edge as it runs in the background even if you are not using it as your browser.
Not sure what age your laptop is but it may still be using a rusty disk to store the software on. A 256gb SSD will serve most older computers well and speed things up by about 6x for program access and boot time.
Bear in mind that Win10 is out of support October 2025 which means a 3rd party antivirus might be a good idea. Cut down versions of Win11 that can run on old equipment are just a lottery and even if the updates work they take ages, slow everything down while they are running and can brick your PC.
I have ran Solus Plasma on a Toshiba Satellite with a 4th generation i3 CPU and everything seemed to be nice and snappy.

brent

BuzzPCSOS

Like the vibe, him choosing an install page picture instead of "debloat"/"streamline" pictures is a little off, but I like this very much as a concept. I will give it a whirl...got nothing to lose.
I found out how to wipe these things and reinstall with no password and no disk yesterday. Hit reboot, hold down left shift key the whole time and follow repair prompts til you get to fresh install screen. little by little.

brent

BuzzPCSOS if you must use windows and want a faster machine then here is the place to go.
Use the command line like the readme says and read a little on what your actions may do. This kills loads of telemetry without breaking Windows and returns a generally better experience. Use this utility to get rid of Edge as it runs in the background even if you are not using it as your browser.

holy mother of god that is a powerful windows tweak tool. thank you. still shoring up partner's gifted laptop. no more black viper disable etc. PS buzz I don't care about W10 end of life (we aren't TPM compatible on this one) in Oct 2025--I figure they will prop W10 up another 2 years after that. Didn't they prop up W7 several years after its 'EOL'?

@WetGeek as far as the older laptop that's mine, I did try a handful of ISO's out like Mageia and OpenSuse and Bodhi but eventually I considered what you had to say and our own XFCE-Beta is installing as we speak. Win10 is gone on this one.

BuzzPCSOS

brent Not sure if that sounds like Windows Recovery or Toshiba Recovery, if it's the latter then you will have all of the original Toshiba bloatware back again and an outdated version of windows to update for about 24 hours. Can't remember what Windows recovery does.
The single best way to clean up an old computer is to wipe and install fresh using the latest MS ISO. Make sure to back up your drivers and save them on another disk for minimum of trouble.
Even on a clean install of Windows the Chris Titus WinUtil speeds things up a little more, cleans up telemetry and helps you remove the stuff that is not needed.

WetGeek

brent our own XFCE-Beta

To be honest, Solus Xfce was a beta version back when Solus 4.5 .ISOs were first released, but I'm pretty sure it's much more than that by now. Did you notice how many packages were upgraded when you did your post-install update?

brent

WetGeek no, he says sheepishly...I'm checking out our own Plasma and Budgie before I pull the trigger

edit: never tried plasma and it would get the whole disk so I'm kicking tires

brent

WetGeek the xfce taskbar widgets are freaky gigantic and startling and the pinned apps on the taskbar are smaller then the widgets. yikes 😦

BuzzPCSOS

brent Solus Plasma is the upgrade to Win 10.

WetGeek

brent never tried plasma and it would get the whole disk so I'm kicking tires

I didn't realize you had gotten so bold. Way to go, Brent!

The one thing that might trip you up a little, as a Plank user, is that you'll need to create your own dock starting with a panel. But the settings you need to change are trivial, and I'd be happy to document them if you need help with it. The end result looks like this:

And it hides, just like a dock. A couple minutes creating it is a very small price to pay for something you'll use forever.

So, what I'm sayin' is, "Don't be intimidated by the loss of a dock." You just create your own from a panel.

brent

BuzzPCSOS my old pop only had 2GB memory on this thing and Plasma is suprisingly limber. I will now juggle several apps at once and see if I can kill it🙂. BRB

edit: he had 4BG on this thing.

brent

WetGeek that's the DIY plasma dock? not the native latte or whatever? like a dock/taskbar marriage?

WetGeek

brent like a dock/taskbar marriage?

Exactly. The icon-only task manager does exactly what a dock does, although you can put it places where you can't put a dock. Basically, in Plasma 6.x, you move the bottom panel to the top (to get it out of the way), then create a new bottom panel, and do a little bit of configuration. Easy peasy. And the overall result looks like this:

WetGeek

WetGeek And the overall result looks like this

The only thing I put into the bottom panel is the task manager, but that's not a restriction of any kind. If that's where you want your date/time, for example, you can put it there, too. So the do-it-yourself dock is much more configurable than most pre-defined docks.

Plasma is the most configurable of all the DEs, in my opinion. And I have all of them, either on hardware, or in VMs. Out of the box, it's very good for most folks, but you can make it look just like Budgie, if you want to. 😄

brent

WetGeek , but you can make it look just like Budgie, if you want to. 😄

well it would be a travel laptop as the budgie desktop would be the DD. if I'm on the go, I would just want everything to work so in solus I trust. my xfce got visually weirder. gnome, no offense anyone. budgie won't launch on the ventoy.
guess plasma was meant to be for this laptop😉. I mean if you can't have an adventure what's the point?

WetGeek

brent it would be a travel laptop as the budgie desktop would be the DD

For what it's worth, until recently, I used Solus Plasma on my little Acer Travelmate - the little 10" Celeron-powered laptop with 2 GB of RAM. (I decided to try Xfce on it more recently, so I switched it.)

I originally bought that little laptop because it fit easily into a side-bag on my touring bike, and I used it to keep in touch from various motels. It was noticeably more sluggish than the same OS/DE on my other laptop with an i7 processor and 16 GB of memory, but still quite usable.

BuzzPCSOS

brent I must admit to being a great fan of Plasma, started my Linux adventure with Mate, ran with Budgie for quite a while but then moved to Plasma and did not look back. It is my go-to Linux DE even on older hardware (read core-two duo intel here). Don't be fooled by the wait to get to the desktop, once you are up and running everything feels responsive and nimble.
If you are running on low ram then change to zswap, Solus ships with zram as stock so you would need to switch off zram before enabling zswap. I have a note of the original instructions to do that if you need them.

WetGeek

I couldn't remember whether I'd ever taken this little TravelMate laptop all the way to Plasma 6.x, so out of curiosity I just started replacing Xfce there with Plasma, and started an update. There are 698 packages being upgraded at the moment.

I suspect that there would be a similar number to be upgraded after installing Plasma Xfce from the 4.5 .ISO file, but that's just a guess.

WetGeek

My curiosity is handled. I've discovered that Plasma 6 will still work on this little TravelMate laptop, but not if I opt for swap with hibernate. It installs, but complains that the screen locker is broken, and I can't log on.

Time to see whether I can upgrade it with some more memory from another laptop. I have one that I'm about to recycle, so I'll save the RAM from that one and see if it works in this one. It's way too nice a little computer to recycle this one.

That'll give me something to keep me busy for a while.

brent

WetGeek I've discovered that Plasma 6 will still work on this little TravelMate laptop, but not if I opt for swap with hibernate.

I had shutdown and startup errors with Plasma with the bios output telling me specifically that my Swap was to blame. I made swap in the installer by checking a button. I believe this to be a mistake. I think buzz up there said plasma ships with zram so I should made a mental note of it.

Since I wrecked two plasma installs I put budgie on there as an experiment: I did not click solus installer button for adding a swap partition. budgie has no problems.

later? side-by-side install w/Plasma now I know what I'm doing I think🙂
Budgie almost 600 packages but all a piece of cake. Plasma install soon.