Generally speaking, you'll want to look up wireless network cards to determine if they are supported by the distro you want to use. Wireless network cards are problematic because some manufacturers of the wireless chipsets are very unhelfpful to the Linux developers who maintain and develop drivers for them.
True dat. I've found the chips in Linksys-style cards (Broadcomm?) to be VERY Linux-unfriendly.
Broadcom chipsets suck. I would never buy a computer that was destined at any point to have Linux on it that had Broadcom wireless. You're just asking for trouble and headaches. It's easier to get around these days, as the reverse engineered drivers will work with them, but you never know when things will break, and they are fragile drivers IMO.
Screw broadcom until they decide to work with is rather than against us.