do you by chance have any experience with the realtek ethernet? I too have seen the conventional wisdom around avoiding the realtek chips. I'm looking to build a linux box (hopefully) soon and filtering out mobos with realtek chips is difficult
They used to be glitchy, I've had okay success with them. The igc module (new igb) is a buggy nightmare on Linux with the kmod maintainers having no idea how to run a speed test with forwarding to also kernel panic... It's really bizarre.
Intel's consumer-oriented Ethernet has also been a disaster on the hardware side lately, with basically all of their 2.5GbE chips having serious bugs. At this point, it seems like Realtek is the sane choice for 2.5GbE, or Aquantia/Marvell for 5/10GbE.
My old Intel laptop from 2016 had a Realtek ethernet gigabit chip and Linux rand fine on it. I don't have it anymore to confirm which chip exactly, nor do I think they still sell that today.
