Reliability is good enough however it differs from area to area. There used to be issues and complains earlier but its pretty much stable now days.
As for the router they can be used in 2 ways one is through a USB cable which would need drivers and therefore one could expect problems as far as linux support is concerned.
the recommended method is however to use the normal lan cable for connection in which case no drivers are needed so it would work out of the box.
Yohan