I'm underwhelmed by the stability of #Ubuntu. Things *generally* work, but:
It's a coin toss if it will recognize the wifi card on a particular bootup.
Sometimes it works when I tell it to restart; sometimes it just hangs.
Unity crashes disturbingly often. It pops up a bug report form, and *after* I fill in all the details, it informs me that it can't send the report.
@mrcompletely My complaint is that I'm not doing anything exotic. I would expect the default configuration to work properly for core features like recognizing my not-home-assembled hardware.
@peterdrake @mrcompletely The Unity spin of Ubuntu isn't the distribution's flagship. It's maintained by a group of enthusiasts.
Intel wifi typically works without issues. I've had problems with MediaTek wifi on Linux sporadically vanishing and not coming to life after a reboot. I've seen reports that, on dual boot machines, Windows puts the MediaTek card in a state that basically hides it from Linux the next time the user boots into it.
@peterdrake @mrcompletely I'll add that I had that "MediaTek wifi card vanishes on reboot" problem on an Asus laptop that wasn't dual boot.
@peterdrake well, just so - my only real feedback to you since I'm not qualified to help troubleshoot is that I see this fairly often across distros, and we use exclusively good quality, normalized hardware. I know "you're not the only one" isn't exactly useful but it can at least act as a sanity check I hope.