Ok... Debian based. Both Ubuntu and Mint are based on Debian.
I assume you’ve seen this: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/218
And this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/55868/how-to-install-broadcom-wireless-drivers-bcm43xx
And this: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/379
Just curious as I’ve never had that problem. Yeah, I’ve had to correctly configure the device via command line, but that’s about it. MAN pages and README’s include a lot of this info.
The idea of using a Windows driver in a wrapper for a networking device never would have crossed my mind.
Nope, that's part of what I meant in saying that a normal person had little or no chance of succeeding at such a thing and, again, even were you to succeed at it, there're still two kinds of performance issues as I noted. One of he things I notice doing ebay searches on 'tenda usb' is that there's a wide range of performances in such devics, 130mbs - 300+ mbs and the price difference is negligable.