I recently became an openwrt user (new Dynalink $79 woot) and am happy, but it isn’t all sunshine and roses as folks tend to rave about it here.
First, the distribution is bare bones to the extreme by default. Like Linux in the 90s bones. Understood, some old routers are tiny, but it makes a RasbPi feel positively ergonomic. Lucky you can install packages pretty easily, like htop etc. Have to install the web gui of course.
Could be wrong but don’t think you can upgrade with a command like Debian. Have to save config and reflash again. Hope not.
Speaking of which, there’s all these config files like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Learning curve steep. Have to bond physical interfaces with APs manually. Odd defaults like wifi clients not allowed to talk to each other. Better get used to hunting online for settings. Fixing that required changing an obscure multicast setting, buried in the gui, not isolation. This is a home not a cafe. :-D
The wiki for my device was hard to follow, basically cut and paste from multiple forum posts with a few critical tidbits missing for a new user. I hunted them down.
I kept very good notes and intended to improve the wiki, but guess what? not editable. Oh and folks who ask questions told to read the wiki fully. I did read it twice at least and have a lot of other experience so trudged through. Had to make an account on one server and ask for account on wiki. Was ignored, got no notifications at least. Post expired.
Now it’s been two weeks… have forgotten a lot and wiki page still shiti. Not how FLOSS is supposed to work. So yeah, happy with it in general but lots of room for improvement.
You can enable ssh in the gui and then login to install packages (using opkg) or edit config files or whatever. opkg is a lot like dpkg but a bit more limited. Unfortunately the login shell is busybox so you're fairly limited in what's available.
All of this is pretty understandable since openwrt is targeted to really low specs . 4MB storage/32MB RAM was the target until 2022. It's now 16MB storage, 128MB RAM which is still pretty low.
First, the distribution is bare bones to the extreme by default. Like Linux in the 90s bones. Understood, some old routers are tiny, but it makes a RasbPi feel positively ergonomic. Lucky you can install packages pretty easily, like htop etc. Have to install the web gui of course.
Could be wrong but don’t think you can upgrade with a command like Debian. Have to save config and reflash again. Hope not.
Speaking of which, there’s all these config files like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Learning curve steep. Have to bond physical interfaces with APs manually. Odd defaults like wifi clients not allowed to talk to each other. Better get used to hunting online for settings. Fixing that required changing an obscure multicast setting, buried in the gui, not isolation. This is a home not a cafe. :-D
The wiki for my device was hard to follow, basically cut and paste from multiple forum posts with a few critical tidbits missing for a new user. I hunted them down.
I kept very good notes and intended to improve the wiki, but guess what? not editable. Oh and folks who ask questions told to read the wiki fully. I did read it twice at least and have a lot of other experience so trudged through. Had to make an account on one server and ask for account on wiki. Was ignored, got no notifications at least. Post expired.
Now it’s been two weeks… have forgotten a lot and wiki page still shiti. Not how FLOSS is supposed to work. So yeah, happy with it in general but lots of room for improvement.