The r8168 ethernet issues and Welcome (experimental)

I think this is the best course of action^^^

There is currently a bug that affects a very small percentage of r8168 adapters that will prevent the r8169 module from loading properly at boot. In these edge cases the r8168 driver must be used.

My own personal opinion is to install the r8168 driver but keep it blacklisted. It can the be easily modprobed manually or changed with a script and your button to switch modules.

Generally r8169 is the preferred module, but a small sub-set of cards do currently need to have the r8168 driver available because of an outstanding bug.

I think scripting automatically switching the module in use via blacklisting is a very good solution as to which driver to use.

The driver switch button (with the r8168 driver already installed) can be acommplished as simply as this:

#use the r8168 driver
echo -e "blacklist r8169" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/realtek_ethernet.conf; sudo modprobe -r r8169; sudo modprobe r8168

To use the r8169 module:

#use the r8169 driver
echo -e "blacklist r8168" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/realtek_ethernet.conf; sudo modprobe -r r8168; sudo modprobe r8169
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