I've now tried to set up Wireless on XP (don't know Vista, no space for it in my house) using Microsoft Zero Config twice, and each time I've given up, because I just could not get it to work. As soon as I used the vendor supplied tool, it worked fine. I could be missing something here, but Zero Config is a lemon as far as I can tell.

Of course, the Belkin, Linksys, and Dlink wireless apps are all different, so you cannot really say that it is Windows that makes it easy if you use their apps.

For Linux, the secret is to choose a wireless chipset that is well supported. Once you do this, Network Manager (for all it's other faults) works fine. Of course, trying to work out what chipset is used is another problem entirely.

I implore all hardware vendors to support Linux as well as they do Windows. Then people would not blame 'Linux' for it's hardware support.