Moreover, out of the box driver is a stock intel wifi driver. It's not vendor-specific. Phew.
> I remember having an issue with the onboard one in my desktop where it would randomly disconnect after negotiating 1Gbps.
That's how the new driver broke one of the NICs. Other ones were just failing to detect carrier at all. The bug you're referring is [0], which I also added some feedback.
> The bug you're referring is [0], which I also added some feedback.
Possibly not, unless I'm misunderstanding. The bug was seen in a Realtek card in 2011-ish.
I'm suspicious that might've colored my opinion of Realtek early on and why I still buy Intel cards to this day. Well, depending on the motherboard, of course.
Oh, then Intel actually caught-up with Realtek and broke their cards the same way for some time then. :)
Realtek's 8139's first revisions was not able to perform well in most cases (~30mbit max speed, unrealiable). 8169 is much much better. Their new wireless cards also work very well if the driver is good, but they have so many sub-models with very different feature sets, so you need to get the exact chip for your needs.
I use a 8111 (PCIe, Gigabit) at office for desktop to laptop bridge and it works fairly well, no stability or speed problems for now.
> Oh, then Intel actually caught-up with Realtek and broke their cards the same way for some time then. :)
Hadn't thought about it that way, but that's hilarious. Realtek's such a trend-setter.
> 8169 is much much better.
Just checked, and apparently that was the card in the machine I had issues with. I think part of the problem is that it was new at the time. So, I can't really fault the drivers per se. I never had any issues with it after they were fixed.
Moreover, out of the box driver is a stock intel wifi driver. It's not vendor-specific. Phew.
> I remember having an issue with the onboard one in my desktop where it would randomly disconnect after negotiating 1Gbps.
That's how the new driver broke one of the NICs. Other ones were just failing to detect carrier at all. The bug you're referring is [0], which I also added some feedback.
[0]: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205047
Realtek's cards are not bad. They're not slow (in terms of latency). They're just not suited to sustained high loads (~60% of interface capacity).