[tails4e]

Their software It's incredibly powerful, but also quite opaque to someone not into hardcore networking. I setup a small private WISP using their gear and configuring it was pretty rough for a non networking nerd. It's not running Linux, but a custom OS. The quickset is handy, but as soon as you want to do something slightly different, you're up to your neck in low level config. Still great HW and if you know how it can do everything you need. Ubiquity gear has a friedlier interface.

[ssl-3]

Mikrotik gear absolutely runs Linux. It just uses a custom userland.

Ubiquity gear is structured the same way: It, too, absolutely runs Linux, and it uses a custom userland.

One of these userlands is friendlier than the other, but they're both still Linux.

It's a tale as old as the hills, or at least as old as the OG Linksys WRT54G -- which was my own first foray into owning dedicated routing hardware ~20 years ago (which was -- guess what -- Linux with a custom userland). (Previous to that, I used Linux with the userland of my choosing on my desktop PC.)

[tbrb]

The biggest life changer to me back when I worked with Mikrotik gear was learning that the '?' character was an immediate "Show me all of the commands I can get to from the current prompt", and then appending '?' to existing commands would show all of the sub commands available etc.

From that point I found the CLI to be relatively discoverable as a way to configure the devices.

[tails4e]

Makes sense. I guess the UI experience, including the terminal was so alien I assumed routerOS was an actual low level OS but, in retrospect, I was an idiot and of course it is Linux under the hood!

[ssl-3]

"Alien" works, and is shorter than descriptions like "asininely feature-complete reimplementation" are.

I like RouterOS well enough, though.