Mint Needs Warning

[pietro2007]

I've been happily using Ubuntu 13.10 on this Dell Inspiron 3521 for the past few weeks, but wanted to give Mint 16/Cinnamon a try. I loaded the LiveCD and discovered the wireless interface was not enabled. After some digging in the Mint forums, I learned that the Broadcom driver was not enabled, and after enabling using the Driver Manager wireless worked fine. So I went ahead and installed Mint, only to discover that, while wireless worked all during installation, it did not work after the installation reboot, and worse, the Driver Manager would not activate the driver. More digging turned up advice from linuxg.net/how-to-fix-broadcom-bcm4311-wireless-driver-on-ubuntu-and-linux-mint. The advice was to remove the bcmwl-kernel-source, get/install linu-firmware-nonfree, and modprobe b43 (and my eternal gratitude to linuxG!). That worked. However, I note that there are dozens (maybe hundreds) of reports of the exact same problem with Mint installations. I cannot see any reason why getting the wireless to work should be so difficult. Would it be too much to ask that you warn people who are installing Mint of these well-known problems (in the Release Notes, if nowhere else)? I'm sure this is not your intent, but if you are trying to alienate new users immediately after installation, you've found a perfect method.