Christopher Aillon mentioned that people like NetworkManager a lot.

While I agree that NetworkManager is something nice, and especially people really expect "Desktop Linux" to have it, there are a lot of other issues.

I've tried netapplet, which is I think a predecessor. It looks just as fancy, but it doesn't really solve my needs. And in fact, I don't think NetworkManager can do that either (yet?).

As usual, it's a bit more than just picking the right essid and maybe displaying the network strength (which doesn't work in netapplet for me, the hostap driver lists a quality of 0 for all networks, but the signal level value is fine), but also a lot about setting up VPN, encryption, handling network switches gracefully - and last but not least: saving power by disabling wireless when not needed.

Also it didn't give me a proper list of networks. It just picked a random one (interestingly not the strongest, actually one I don't see right now...) and never showed the other 5 access points. That doesn't mean of course that NetworkDaemon wouldn't, it's just not in Debian yet, so I didn't try it yet.

Guessnet is a nice tool for detecting your network setup. Using mii-tool it can detect whether my network cable is plugged in, and by doing "ifup eth0 || ifup wlan0" I can bring up whatever is available. Well, almost except that guessnet also fails to detect my wireless networks (it probably would just need to wait a second for the scan to run).

I agree that this is mostly an issue of the wireless driver. But just about every driver has it's own issues, unfortunately. For example, the vanilla orinoco driver doesn't do scanning. The hostap driver doesn't properly power down (right now I'm using some iwpriv hack to disable radio tx to save some power), the ralink driver has been locking up the laptop every now and then... some drivers don't do WEP, others don't to WPA. The wireless keyboard shortcut obviously didn't work either...

So maybe, we right now (once more) need more people working on the drivers.

Oh, and there are more issues with drivers - for example Scorched3D still doesn't work properly on radeon. The OSS nvidia drivers still don't have 3D. Some bluetooth headsets don't work yet... and the closed source drivers are even worse (a pain to install since they aren't properly integrated in the distributions etc.).

So Linux still needs more support by hardware vendors (especially WRT to specs!) as well as more people actually doing the dirty job in C and not just having fun with PHP, Python and Mono.