With Wireless in Debian you have to install the packages that Ubuntu uses.
Ubuntu = Debian Unstable snapshot + Ubuntu modified gnome and updated packages for supported stuff.
It's mutually benificial. Most interesting packages from Ubuntu either get folded back into Gnome and then into Debian that way, or they end up going into Debian as just repackaged Debian packages. For Ubuntu they can build their system based on Debian and concintrate on providing a relatively more specific audiance the best experiance possible.
For mobile networking you have Network-Manager + nm-applet for automatic network configuration and applet display. It's the same when it comes to drivers.
Also I use Avahi for broadcast dns stuff and 'Bonjour' (OS X name for it) detection of services. It's actually quite nicer then the Bonjour stuff that Apple open source'd in terms of integration, capabilities, and features. To bad the rest of the system doesn't automaticly configure itself to use that stuff.
For a summary how I feel:
Ubuntu advantages:
- Desktop oriented default setup. Very nice out of the box. Debian takes configuration work in order to get to that same level.
- Newbie oriented documentation, newbie friendly community, good resources.
- Doesn't suffer from newbie oriented only stuff like Madriva can. It's usefull for all users from very new Linux users to very advanced.
- Newer packages then Debian for a lot of stuff. You get X.org first. Get things like Python 2.4 first. This is due to Debian having to upgrade incrementally vs Ubuntu six month release cycle. For big change overs/ABI changes it can be difficult for Debian devs.
- Much quicker updates between releases. 6 months vs a year or more.
Advantages Debian:
- Much more substantial supported software. With Ubuntu your limited to the 'official' repos when you want support. Debian support is for what would be the equivelent of all the official Ubuntu stuff PLUS all the universe repos.
- Debian Stable is more suitable for large scale deployment then Ubuntu. Official support lasts years. Everything that is in there 'just works' and can be relied on to work. If you train users to use Debian stable they will be able to just keep using it for a long long time. Same way for packages you build for custom software.
Also due to the massive number of packages and software configurations supported Debian is much easier to customize for special circumstances then Ubuntu and you can still get help and file bug reports for it.
- Major upgrades. Going from Debian Stable to Debian stable is less troublesome. Troublespots are much more well documented and noted. There is much less suprises.
- Updates are small. Only major bug fixes or security updates. I don't know so much for Ubuntu, but for Fedora Core it suffers from this very badly.. were after a release they do a huge updates. Halfway through the life of the system they will do things like go from a older X.org system to a new one. This is very disruptive.
- For normal personal desktop you would use Testing or Sid. This provides software that is as up to date as Ubuntu. (more or less. It depends on the current life cycle of the current Ubuntu release. Sometimes slightly newer, other times slightly older) However the upgrades are incrimental. There is no reinstall. You can quite successfully track Testing for years and years and only have to reboot for kernel upgrades and have up to date software the entire time. (the downside is that you have to watch for occasional software breakage during upgrades)
When I said 'Debian, duh' up there I was being sarcastic. This is a very bad question to ask 'Which is best for Desktop'
Distros are geared towards specific purposes and specific ways of doing things. They all generally have the same software and generally have the the same hardware drivers and that sort of thing.
What you choose is personal and based on any criteria or circumstances.
For instance in corporate land you may want to run Redhat for your servers due to the support. Or you may be forced to because of some specific software you need that only supports Redhat.
In that case for you own desktop you wil probably want to run Fedora snce it more closely matches what your using. And for normal desktop you don't need support for you may want to run CentOS due to the fact that it's more stable then FC.
Other people just realy hate Ubuntu or Debian. For them Yast and Suse is much nicer.
It takes all types.