[rektide]

It's a great idea.

It's a bit of a pain the ass from a hardware sense. OpenWRT is available & easy but there's quite limited hardware (newely no wifi6), but honestly, at this point, I'd much rather use a real computer and some add-in cards.

Alas availability of hardware- specifically AP grade cards & things to plug them into is forsakenly awful. One has to scrounge around for increasingly absurdly priced botique adapters with awful availability. Thankfully we're starting to see m.2 form-factor show up, but it used to all be mini-pcie or just mini-pci, which wifi and only wifi uses & is hard to find. Oh and for real AP grade cards, they have good sized heatsinks and sometimes require auxiliary DC power, which is just like two test point stubs you have to freeform find power for.

For a while Compex was making cards eith equivalent-ish performance (same chipset) to a popular longrunning openwrt router, the Netgear x4s, for significantly under $100. But modern AP chips are super hard to find last I checked, had huge-ish boards, and were over $200.

Its a long hope but AP over USB is something I did for a long time & was never quite right & I eventually gave up, after trying dozens of chipsets, but folk like MediaTek seem to be far lower bullshit than the past shady ass sorrid sad history of wifi, and it feels like it may come about again. The ideal world is that like a $100 wifi usb card would just work. And then we could potentially seed these cheaper things all around; not as powerful or capable maybe, but more than made up for by having much smaller cell size: the actual cure-all of wifi!

Im excited for a world where we get beyond openwrt. It's been great but it's a tight narrow specific fix, on a troubled set of platforms, with a lot of constraints. A small PC-based revolution would be great to see. Just run Debian or Arch, what you know. Have standard & upgradeable componentry for cards. It'd be nice for wifi to not be so very very special & bundled.

[dtaht]

I too wish that we could easily use everything as an AP. My vision back then was that we would go meshy for everything. For many years I had full adhoc support (babel and batman protocols) and could go from device to device, from ethernet to wifi and back again, without losing a nailed up connection. I couldn't figure out why APs were so popular... the wifi protocol scaled then to 13 miles, now it barely goes behind the couch.

USB is a terrible idea for latency. CARDBUS was so much better. I hate usb audio interfaces with a passion, also.

OpenWrt has a place in that itty bitty boxes needed custom compilers and close attention paid to very small amounts of d and i-cache, which those running ubuntu + systemd have kind of missed, as well as tight integration with all the core tools like dns and dhcp and a zillion ip protocol encapsulations desktop OSes lack.

I see a lot of ubuntu and debian entering the embedded space now that cpus have got cache and memory to burn, and I do hope that one day we see more wifi pci cards that can actually function as APs, and antennas that work.

Presently that is hard to do - the iwl wifi6 cards kind of suck, and it is hard to find mt79 chips, and the ath10k was a huge step backwards from the ath9k in many respects.

[zekica]

I run OpenWRT on ASUS RT-AX53U (WiFi 6 - MT915E) and it works fine - as an AP only, it can manage 800Mbps and routing with no SQM 500Mpbs (using Software Flow Offloading).

[rektide]

Openwrt works fine but it's all so special. Special software running on special hardware. Just having a PC with a good card in it has soundsd greatly appealing for so long.

During the PogoPlug/SheevaPlug phase I had some nice repurposed hardware that ran upstream Debian, had good ram, and some capable atheros wifi. It was so nice having a less special purpose system, having just a regular computer that happened to have good wifi ap gear plugged in.

Openwrt "works fine" but it feels like a fallback position, something I have merely resorted to, for having failed to do what should be obvious & easy with everyday add-ins.

[simoncion]

> Openwrt works fine but it's all so special. Special software running on special hardware.

Doesn't OpenWRT work on x86 hardware just fine? <https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=22.03.3&targe...>

(You can select 32-bit x86 or two other flavors if you don't want to run on x86/64.)

[rektide]

OpenWRT is itself ultra special. It has a very narrow mission statement. If you learn openwrt, and then want to runa desktop, you'll have to learn a new thing.

The special purpose nature of openwrt makes it surpemely disinteresting to me. Actually setting up a home network with masquerading, dhcp, some dns is shockingly easy with systemd. Add hostapd and some extras, maybe miniupnpd, traffic shappers, optionally some firewall and you're set.

There's a comfort & perceived desire to "make things simple for oneself" by using "tools meant for the job". But it's a shitty suboptimization. Openwrt isnt really that special or good, it's chiefly just the most aggressively well maintained way to run linux on a lot of little router systems. If that roadblock went away & we could use whatever, there would be a shitload more people trying new stuff atop much more general linux oses.

I've been using openwrt for over q decade. It's fine. It does the job. But it's an evolutionary dead end, will ne what it is forever, and it's a bit special. It has a bunch of NIH'ed smaller sized alternative tools that no one else in the linux multiverse uses. Their own package manager, their own dbus replacement, their own config systems. It's all generally fine but it's made practically no dent in the broader Linux world, it requires a lot of onboarding & learning to get actually decent at, it has a lot of constraints/narrow options, and it'd be lovely if we had any choice at all to run something else, something more normal & regular, but we've beem trapped running openwrt on these weird ass strange devices for almost two decades. It sucks being tied to openwrt, openwrt is the specia system, and having more generic Linux computing we could be doing here has such huge appeal.

I'd love do know how many people use x86 openwrt, for laughs. Dozens? A hundred? How many actually log in & use that machine with any regularity? Openwrt indeed can run on regular hardware, but in practice there's no reason to, no advantage to, no cause here, because if we have real computing hardware that isnt batshit insane & troublesome we immediately reach for mainstream regular Linux distros, not the very special opemwrt thing that exists only really for weird hardware.

[simoncion]

> I'd love do know how many people use x86 openwrt...

I mean, if I didn't _explicitly_ want to use Gentoo Linux on my x86-64 router, I'd be using OpenWRT. OpenWRT is far more than sufficient for the typical home network, and generally quite good enough for a power-user's home network.

Regardless, I brought up OpenWRT on x86 to mention that OpenWRT runs and runs _just fine_ on non-special hardware.

> But it's an evolutionary dead end, will ne what it is forever, and it's a bit special. It has a bunch of NIH'ed smaller sized alternative tools that no one else in the linux multiverse uses.

This... isn't a problem? Like, not even a little bit.

OpenWRT, Vyatta, Juniper's Junos OS, Cisco's iOS, Mikrotik's RouterOS, Ubiquiti's Vyatta fork all use different tooling and have different UIs. Of the set, I prefer Junos (for its transactional configuration application and automated rollback), Mikrotik (for its weird little interactive shell), and OpenWRT (because it's more or less an ordinary Linux with largely-Linux-standard software, and the bulk of the rest of it is shell scripts that you can pretty easily understand and modify if needed).

[dtaht]

I still use it on x86 a lot. The apu series runs forever on 5 watts. The openwrt gui is better than systemd. It is easy to setup vlans and tunnels on openwrt. That said, I do wish strongly that the wifi market would have a decent card for your laptop that would let it do ap mode well.