I impulsively bought a Toshiba Ultrabook a few weeks ago. I’m a huge fan of small portable laptop computers. I’ve been using a mid 2012 11 inch MacBook Air and a Dell XPS 13 (L321X) laptops for a couple of years now. Performance on my MacBook Air is fair, however on the XPS 13, the 2nd generation 1.6Ghz Sandy Bridge has starting to become a bottleneck for me. Not mention it’s 4GB of RAM limitation that’s soldered into the laptop so I can’t upgrade it. So it came time to buy myself a new laptop PC. The only caveat is the fact that it’s not a new computer per say. I bought a refurbished unit. At just under $550 (including tax), I bought myself a powerful tiny computer.
Toshiba Satellite Radius 12 P25W-C2300-4K 12.5
- 2-in-1 Table Touchscreen Laptop
- Intel Core i7-6500U Processor 2.5GHz
- Microsoft Windows 10 Home
- 8GB LPDDR3-1600 Onboard RAM
- 256GB M.2 Solid State Drive
- Backlit Keyboard
Reviews are not to great for this laptop, so I wasn’t to hesitant of the possibility of returning the computer back after the 15 days of purchase and get my money back. The 15 days have passed and I ended up keeping the computer. Also, from what I can see online, it looks like the laptop has been discontinued!
At first, to my surprise I wasn’t able to find any useful information on the internet regarding the compatibility of this laptop with Linux. I’m dual booting with Windows 10 Home edition along with Ubuntu 16.04 on this laptop as of the time of this writing. So as far as compatibility with Linux goes. Everything works perfectly fine.
Keyboard:
The keyboard is ok, I’d prefer the keyboard on the XPS 13. One tiny annoyance is that the backtick/tilde key (~`) is next to the spacebar instead of the “Alt/Command” key. Instead of being before the number 1 key, like on any other traditional keyboard. Occasionally, I find myself accidentally triggering the backtick/tilde instead of the “Alt/Command” key. Also, the arrow keys are a bit to small for my liking, but not terrible. All special functions keys work perfectly, ie.; screen light, media keys, etc.
Another small keyboard annoyance is that I can’t adjust the lighting on the backlit keyboard. In fact, the backlit is only kept on if you’re using the keyboard. I suspect Toshiba made this awful choice in favor of saving battery life.
Battery:
Battery life on this laptop is not that great, I think the culprit is the beautiful screen. Under moderate use, I get around 4-6 hours battery life.
Trackpad:
Two-finger scrolling and two-finger right click work out of the box. The trackpad was a little to sensible but after a few tweaks, it’s almost perfect. Let’s face it the only worthy trackpads on laptop’s nowadays are those in Apple computers. On the other-hand it’s such a shame new Apple laptop keyboard keys are complete garbage, but I digress. These were the changes I made so that the trackpad doesn’t get easily triggered when I’m typing on the keyboard.
Screen/Touch:
Touch screen works perfectly, however the major gotcha with my new laptop and it never crossed my mind when I initially bought the computer was the 4k HiDPI screen. When I loaded up Ubuntu, everything was absolutely tiny. I really wasn’t able to find any good documentation to fixing the HiDPI problems for Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. This was a huge surprise giving that Dell sells HiDPI XPS 13 machines with Ubuntu pre-installed! Thanks to the Arch Wiki documentation, I learned Gnome has good HiDPI support. So I ditched Unity for Gnome, and I must say the HiDPI support in Gnome is awesome. The 3140×2160 screen is absolute gorgeous. Practically all applications are scaled up properly, including my important core applications that I use the most.
- File Manager
- Terminal (terminator)
- LibreOffice
- Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird
- VirtualBox, virt-manager
- Spotify
So far I’m loving my new PC.