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by cheald 3113 days ago
LEDE is basically an OpenWRT fork which is being actively developed. The biggest draw is that it's actively developed, and managed in a Linux-style package manager setup, rather than monolithic baked firmwares that you have to flash wholesale. Patching against things like KRACK was as simple as just invoking the package manager.

DD-WRT and Tomato are both old tried-and-true alternatives to vendor firmwares, and they require less tinkering to get into the state that you want, but they both tend to have weird crufty edge cases that never get properly fixed and don't seem to have any clear direction or leadership - they are both a hodgepodge of forks that you have to spend time digging through hundred-page forum threads to find information about. Development schedules are sporadic, and you often end up with dozens of potential builds in varying states of beta and testing which fix this or that but break this or that other thing. When they work, they're great, but my experience with LEDE has been consistently superior than my experience with DD-WRT or Tomato.
2 comments
0xcde4c3db 3113 days ago
Just to be clear, OpenWRT isn't 100% abandoned, but it's basically just a handful of sporadic package version bumps and backported bug fixes, which might not ever make it into an official numbered release. If the counts on GitHub are accurate/comparable, LEDE has almost 2000 more commits than OpenWRT. The OpenWRT website also seems to be semi-abandoned (the front page has had a spam post on it for over a month; it looks like it was moved there accidentally by a moderator intending to move it to a "trash" subforum).
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rrauenza 3113 days ago
I naively bought the Linksys WRT 1900AC about when it released because it claimed dd-wrt support at release.

Then the dd-wrt folks mentioned that Linksys never actually gave them hardware ... and if I recall, hadn't really been included in the plans to support it at all.

So then I waited and found whenever I looked for the dd-wrt firmware, it always had lots of caveats and known issues.

I gave up. Shelved it and bought a pfsense box for the internet and use a Ubiquity wifi AP.

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rufugee 3113 days ago
I ran openwrt and then lede on a wrt1900ac v2 for about 1.5 years until last week. Initially, stability was spotty, but the latest Lede images worked generally well. However, while vlans with Lede worked perfectly with my two TP-Link WDR3600s, the Lede ultimately had issues with it. I tried one last thing, probably bricked it, and that was the last straw...ordered three Unifi aps and couldn't be happier.

OpenWRT/LEDE is great assuming your device is well-supported and well-tested. Unfortunately, the wrt1900ac line was never as open as Linksys claimed it was, the LEDE devs didn't get the support they needed from Linksys when they needed it, and so certain things still don't seem to work.

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crypt1d 3113 days ago
I use ddwrt on my wrt1900ac. its quite fine, but I may try LEDE anyway
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jburgess777 3113 days ago
The plan is for the LEDE and OpenWRT projects to "remerge" but the implementation is taking some time:

https://lwn.net/Articles/722135/

http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/lede-adm/2017-November/...

http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/lede-dev/2017-December/...

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