Quality of FreeBSD

[Peter Jeremy]

On Thu, 2005-Jul-21 17:46:13 +0200, Martin wrote:
>One more thing about "cheap hardware": if you know that a piece of
>hardware is potentially buggy (I mean real BUGS and not missing
>support), please publish your opinion, because I will buy hardware
>FOR FREEBSD, so I avoid major problems. How about test suites for
>ACPI quality, e.g.? Would it be possible?

In general, I'd say what you want isn't achievable.  Firstly, there's
the risk of legal action from a vendor who believes they have been
maligned and the reliability (or lack thereof) of the supplied
opinions.

More critically, vendors often make (significant to FreeBSD) changes
to products without any obvious external differences.  For example,
wireless cards that are externally identical but have different
chipsets when you open the packaging.  And there's no way to ensure
that the BIOS and ACPI in the motherboard you bought last week bears
any resemblance to the BIOS and ACPI in the supposedly identical
motherboard that I buy this week.

As far as the vendor is concerned, as long as it (sort of) works on
Windoze when you use the vendor-supplied driver then the vendor has
fulfilled their "fit-for-use" responsibility.

-- 
Peter Jeremy