If you are considering migrating from Windows to Linux you are probably concerned that dealing with network hardware is going to be a nightmare. You will be happy to know that setting up and controlling network devices is much easier in Linux than it is in Windows. Modern Linux distributions benefit from two very important improvements:

• Improvements in hardware support
• Improvements in graphical configuration tools

Article Source Linux Journal
April 16, 2009, 8:11 am

SOCKS is built in to OpenSSH, so it's a trivial matter to set up a local SOCKS proxy with the -D flag...

Simply click on the Network-Manager icon to see all available wireless networks, and click on the network to connect to it. If wireless authentication is needed, be it WEP, WPA, or 802.1x, a network-manager dialog will pop up asking for your authentication details.