Always had problems with empty server select on Linux. Threw together a
little Windows app that does nothing but connect to the login server and dump the server name strings. Never had any problems getting the server list using this app through Wine.
I assumed there was some issue with Wine's implementation of the Win32-specific socket functions (WSASocket and friends --
of course Verant and SOE used all the Windows-specific calls instead of the equivalent standard ones). Maybe it delays things just enough to exacerbate issues with wifi... but if it happens on Windows too, there's probably more to it than that.
No idea why Login specifically would be so fragile, char select and zones use the same packet protocol to address dropped packets. Maybe it doesn't actually wait until you receive the whole server list and just goes "they hit the Connect button, we're going to server select in x milliseconds whether we have anything to show them or not!" ? Would be a bizarre choice for a game that started in the dialup days, though.