Comment 62 for bug 191889

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.

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.