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.

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.

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...

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.