Comment Virtually always been a problem (Score 1) 7
Wireless has rarely worked out of the box for Fedora and Mandrake, even though kernel support experiments started around early 2006. Even the latest Red Hat Centos (2009's v5.4) needed poking though half of the packages were silently waiting at the expected places... I think my downloaded wireless firmware is what fixed it.
Back when I got Nexenta, OpenSolaris, Slax and Knoppix, I first checked the tray for wireless networks, then ifconfig, and even whether iwspy was installed. Ubuntu is the only one rich&bold enough to launch "ready to connect" without needing ndiswrapper, ever since version 7.
Distros / Desktop environments have some welcome materials but are mum on why wireless support is ignored on mobile platforms. They assume nobody owns laptops and netbooks this day and edge, to be testing their distros out on it. I have a 3 year old Toshiba that had Fedora with varying degrees of "instant success" on wireless depending on versions. My second test is whether I any distro writes to NTFS partitions out of the box. I think that's been surmounted, but the past 4 years it was a headache to find why NTFS folders marked rwx would silently fail to write and not read.
Fedora was never a reasonable distro for me: too much pain on the bleeding edge. On the other hand, Centos gives me much pain because the edge is mostly 3 year old bluntness, and many tools do not appear to have been QA'd. I'll give the next release another try before tossing Red Hat out altogether.
If you must know, keychain access fails to remember or manage passwords and asks for them a million times with no off button... wireless connectivity (NetworkManager) is buggy and re-asks for passwords. Some Gnome applets are plainly broken: stocks ticker fails to update and the weather app does nothing until you refresh it. OpenOffice 2 databases have issues on some files created in 3, in a silent fail issue, and yum isn't tuned to let you download version 3 unless you go poking with rogue repos. Ubuntu seems to be fine. I am hating the man at the top, but at least it does feel like the most trouble-free home distro going back 4 years. I'm not upgrading from 9.04, though.