Comment 7 for bug 291576

While both drivers may have their strengths/weaknesses, it is certainly a weakness of Ubuntu 8.10 that it ships with a driver which does not work out of the box.
I use Ubuntu 8.10 on a Thinkpad T60, and for me it was a really big nuisance that I couldn't make suspend/resume work properly, until I discovered bug #275692 (reload ath_pci module on resume). Certainly, the average first-time user isn't going to fix this problem by himself - he'll simply dump Ubuntu.
It is even more frustrating to find that this problem was reported 6 months earlier on Hardy (bug #194607) and it is still not fixed.
I replaced madwifi with ath5k, and it works immediately. No patches required to make suspend/resume work. ath5k also makes WPA authentication complete much faster, for some reason which I don't know.
At the bottom line, based on my experience with Ubuntu 8.10, I agree that shipping madwifi as default was a big mistake. Sadly, it has probably scared away a lot of potential users.
If bug #194607 had been resolved in Hardy, avoiding bug #275692 in Intrepid, ath_pci would probably have worked OK for most users. But really, Ubuntu - come on and address the bugs. It's sooo embarrasing to let these kinds of problems pass through several releases.