[fpgeek]

WiFi not working at all is a different matter, but not working with a specific wireless card is a quirk.

Mini PCI Express is a standard (as was Mini PCI before it). Swapping out a laptop wireless card you don't like isn't that hard. I've done it several times (to get dual band support, for better Linux drivers, etc).

Spending around $100 (including installation if you don't want to do it yourself) may be annoying, but it shouldn't be a deal breaker.

[stsp]

Some laptops check wifi minipci cards against a PCI ID device whitelist in the BIOS. For instance, all Thinkpads do this. It's seriously annoying and means that the OS must support a very specific set of devices or wifi won't work. For some machines a hacked BIOS can be flashed to disable this check but that's not always available.

Apart from reverse-engineering yet more hardware and writing more drivers, there is not much the OpenBSD project can do about this.

Fixing the root cause would be best. Vendors who do such things must be convinced to stop doing them.

If vendors also released freely available documentation for the hardware (read: freely accessible manuals for driver developers, no NDA required to read) then end users of free software could live in a world where wireless not working would be the exception.