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by squarefoot 2403 days ago
Not an expert here, anyway for not too weak x86 hardware (port to ARM is in progress though) I found OpnSense to be a wonderful choice, while for repurposed home routers where the different architecture, memory size and CPU capabilities would make it impossible, I believe the only currently supported one is OpenWRT which I like a lot less, although I concur many of its limitations would probably affect OpnSense too if it was forced to run under the same hardware constraints. I run for several years a PFsense home router, before it was forked to OpnSense, on a PCengines board: https://pcengines.ch/ It worked flawlessly for years, and when a problematic migration from one ISP to a different one forced me out of the Internet for a few months (yup, months!) All I had to do was setting up the WiFi card as WAN and some rules to use it as such, connect a higher gain antenna then find an open spot (there were a lot back then) in my area and bingo: instant connection to the whole house, even much faster than the one I had before. All this perfectly doable with OpenWRT too, but the OpnSense interface at least to me is much much more clear to operate and helps me to understand what I'm doing. Last time I used OpenWRT was to convert one of those micro tp-link "3G" routers so that it connected my LAN only printer to the house WiFi network; in the end all went ok, and it works like charm, though honestly if I had to replicate what I did, I would surely have to read the howtos thoroughly and fail another dozen times again because an extremely simple operation was split into so many others in different pages that I've completely forgotten what I did. OpenWRT is great, potentially even better than OpnSense and other BSD based ones, due to the huge availability of drivers and supported hardware Linux can count on, but it badly needs some good improvements in usability.