Some old fashioned assistance requested, and some oppinions wanted.

[Jim Stapleton]

Ok, to start this off, and so you know where I'm coming from - I do a
lot with comptuers and I'm visually impared.

This makes notebooks a royal pain in the posterior - to the point
where I NEED a few features in KDE/Gnome,a nd cannot use Windows.
However, add to that a lot of manufacturers don't support their
customers very well, not even if it is plain and simple hardware, and
you suddenly have a *very* restrictive list. I I've had bad
experiences with many companies, and good experiences with really only
two. One of which, while BSD/Linux friendly, is out of the picture for
reasons of exceptionally immoral and frivolous lawsuites (in my
oppinion), the other, while their support is surperb, does not provide
drivers for anything but windows, and does weird stuff to their
hardware. The latter company is Toshiba.

I'm putting this here on the questions and not the mobile forum
because I believe that they also make non-mobile machines, and this is
a slightly more wide ranging question that normally is found there.

My question:
1) If Toshiba were to provide open source drivers for it's
"weirdities", would you purchase their machines?

2) If "yes" to #1, would you join me in a snail-mail writing campaign
to them to request they provide drivers for BSD and/or Linux -
preferrably open source for one, or closed source for both, if it must
remain closed for whatever reasons.

3) Off the topic of the main post, what are your top 3 vendors if your
main consideration is the combination of (1) FreeBSD compatable
hardware, and (2) Reliable/Honest/Intelligent and Customer Friendly
tech support for hardware issues.

Thanks,
-Jim Stapleton