I was only answering the question why there was a difference. I am not
suggesting that it is necessary to go back to 8.10 or 8.04.

Not everybody should be running the latest version. 8.04 is an LTS release
meaning it is considered stable and has long term support. This is for
enterprise people who do not like surprises and want a rock solid system
that just works. Many newbies should stay there until they feel comfortable.
Six month releases are not considered as stable. There are significant
changes that can give headaches.

Consider when Windows Vista came out and the law cases that ensued due to
failed promises of being Vista ready or capable. You see nobody can
guarantee that an upgrade will mean all of your hardware will work, even
Microsoft with all of its connections to hardware vendors and money to burn
has problems. In contrast open source relies on good will of vendors as it
has no special relationship. It is hard to dot all of the i's and cross all
of the t's. These people try their best, but sometimes things don't work
for various reasons.

My advice is for new users to choose the LTS as their entry point. Then be
ready and willing to learn. As they do they can move up to more recent
releases. Even veterans have problems. I get breakage all of the time. The
difference is they know how to resolve them or are willing to do some foot
work to find out how to fix it. In rare cases there are no solutions.

There was a major shift from 8.10 to 9.04 that caught many users off guard.
They were not sufficiently informed about what was new and how this could
affect them. When they jumped in with both feet they had problems. The
problem for most people was with graphics. There were also some overlooked
networking changes from 8.04 to 8.10 and to 9.04. They were subtle, but
significant.

Wireless problems are the easiest to resolve in many ways due to the
existence of ndiswrapper and ndisgtk which enable you to use your Widnows
driver in Linux. This is not the best fix, but it should work provided you
can locate a Windows driver for your card.