The sorry state of affairs in Linux wireless card support, to my understanding, stems from Linus' refusal to allow his kernel to be polluted by something as quotidian as a wireless driver.
Its about binary blobs, and it dosent matter what Linus want. Any one can add binary blobs, like networking and GPU drivers if they want to. And make a distribution with it. Like Ubuntu do...
If the manufacturers would open source their drivers, they would be implemented in the kernel.
I have mainly used Linux on x86 and AMD64 computers, and its been 7-8 years since i had any networking problems.
The only exception i can think of, is my dads Asus EEE. He ran some taste of Linux on it, i dont remember which, but wireless didnt work untill after some fiddling.
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