Quality of FreeBSD

[pcasidy at casidy.com]

Hi all!

I have read this thread with a lot of interest and I have to
congratulate each of you for bringing calm, clever and interesting
answers.

I too felt that the quality of 5.x is not what I was used to but there
are new nice and promising features.

Having read most of all the emails it looks like to me that there is a
key element : the hardware. There are too many combinations on the
market to build an "i386-like" based platform.

Isn't it time to build a suggested hardware list or a hardware
blacklist?
I do not how to do that because maybe there is a high risk of being sued
by a company making bad hardware even under the right of free speech.
Perhaps it can be done by making a list of hardware company from which
FreeBSD has a good support (not saying good hardware but good feedback
on how to solve problems).
I know of the hardware vendor and supported hardware list but I am not
sure if it is up to date and I diddn't manage to get good use of it :
how has it really be tested on that hardware?

My main problem, and to others after seeing the question from times to
times, is to know which is a good (not necessarly the best) hardware to
run FreeBSD on?
When I buy a new motherboard, which chipset to choose/avoid, which controllers?

Twenty years ago, when you bought a computer (not a PC), the system
delivered with it used to work well or had known problems with
workarounds. Okay, there were simpler but in case of problems, it was
easy to try to reproduce and investigate the problem.

I am not saying we should choose one defined platform. I don't know if
it is feasible but having a list of hardware recommendations from which
we are sure to get good support from would be an added value.

As it is too hard to support every combination of hardware why not focus
on a few ones? Maybe the ones developpers have an esay access to?
If someone use another combination, no problem : he will have the same
support as today.

Thanks for reading my attempt to move forward.

Phil.