After a fresh install of KDE 4.14 on top of Debian (jessie), I'm having trouble getting connected through wireless. I haven't tried yet using the CLI, or by editing wpa_supplicant.conf, because this laptop is going to be used by someone who's not into that kind of stuff.

The network manager widget looks like this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40915828/emptynw.png

For some reason, there's an additional interface called wlan0:avahi. Bringing this interface down had no effect, and I have no idea what it does.
Output of ifconfig (I'm connected now on eth0):

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eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1b:24:d4:ca:9e 
          inet addr:192.168.0.100  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::21b:24ff:fed4:ca9e/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:17 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:71 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:3402 (3.3 KiB)  TX bytes:10566 (10.3 KiB)

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback 
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:65536  Metric:1
          RX packets:102 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:102 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:9028 (8.8 KiB)  TX bytes:9028 (8.8 KiB)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1a:73:c6:8d:fd 
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)

wlan0:avahi Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:1a:73:c6:8d:fd 
          inet addr:169.254.11.120  Bcast:169.254.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1


My /etc/network/interface file:

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# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp 


It's weird that the applet even doesn't show you your active ethernet connection. What version of NetworkManager do you have? Can you check whether NetworkManager see some available accesspoints using "nmcli device wifi list"?