Comment 165 for bug 191889

(In reply to comment #12)
> Part of that is because Ubuntu ships many quite horrible-quality drivers that
> simply don't work with wpa_supplicant and NM, because they don't support WEXT
> properly. I laud their efforts to make as much hardware work as possible, but
> unfortunately the _quality_ of that support for many drivers just sucks.
>
> If you're using out-of-kernel drivers (ubuntu has in the past had 4 different
> _stacks_ in their kernel, including net80211, linux-wlan-ng, vendor drivers,
> etc not to mention shipping ndiswrapper) then there's not much that _anyone_
> can do to guarantee the quality of those drivers, and every time somebody asks
> why their card doesn't work when it uses an out-of-kernel driver, I can usually
> find 3 or 4 major errors in the driver's WEXT conformance.
>

I agree that there is a bunch of crappy drivers out there.

However, most drivers you referred to in your blog appear to be drivers for old hardware that dont have a modern replacement. Should we just drop support for them completely in order to stop network manager from misbehaving?

> Yes, Ubuntu has a large user base and it's probably something FF has to work
> around given that. But many of the reasons that NM doesn't work for people
> using Ubuntu are specifically because of bad choices Ubuntu has made when
> packaging NetworkManager (often for ndiswrapper and madwifi) and when stuffing
> bad quality drivers into their kernel packages.
>
> Doesn't help the users of FF though since you obviously can't blame them for
> the distro they use.

IMO, the network manager online state is not reliable by design and probably its main use case is to provide a way to fast-fail attempts to connect to a network resource.

Thus, I think that network-manager could tune its heuristic to always expose "online" when there is a route to any network.

What do you think?