So this laptop I'm working got trashed really hard, DVD-ROM didn't want to work and the Wireless card got disabled. The obvious conclusion is that something is in the Windows 8.1 OS. It was almost impossible to boot anything. It didn't want to recognize any DVDs I burned of GNU/Linux or Windows. So I had two options left for this mild issue, either setup PXE because it's a super safe bet or try with USB. I don't like Toshiba as a laptop brand. I had problems booting in their UEFI mode, so I switched to CSM and there it was, it recognized the USB has an OS. Got rid of all partitions and install OpenSUSE 13.1 which was lying around in my HDD. DVD-ROM started working and so did the Wireless card. As much as I wanted to leave the system with OpenSUSE, I couldn't. Now I'm installing Windows 8.1 on it. Needless to say, not being able to boot stuff that should be bootable SUCKS big time. This is the first time I had to deal with BIOS stuff regarding UEFI. I've installed Debian and other operative systems on other brands and they never did that. That aside, I was heavily impressed on how polished KDE is on OpenSUSE. Probably one of the best customization ever, with a lot of handy stuff (Printer auto detection, etc)
Most of my computers are 5+ years old so I rarely have a chance to mess with UEFI I know its the newest greatest way to setup bootable hardware and SteamOS requires it. Glad to see OpenSUSE saved the day! Sad to see it go away! Hey that rhymes Honestly, I'm not very impressed with Window$ 8 at all. I have it at work and on one machine at home. When I played Path of Exile with my wife (me in Mint 17 & her in Win8) there was a lot of crashing on her end. Even the loading times for the game were longer. So its interesting to see Wine perform better than Windows 8 in this scenario. I love using Linux to rescue, troubleshoot some hardware. Even when you don't have a hard drive, a bootable USB drive with Linux is amazing!
My mom has a Toshiba laptop, but for my mom's next laptop I will get her a Lenovo or Asus. And yes, Linux always saves the day!
