The long term strategy is to run a proxmox host as your Layer3 platform and install a virtual owrt instance there. Then you are relieved of the HW drama that surrounds owrt. Obviously a second proxmox host is needed for your backend servers, I'm not advocating for a singular VM platform. Once you virtualized your router, you can comfortably experiment with pf,opn,fire,vya ..platforms.

Oh and skip Mikrotik, those people are so in love with their routerOs they fail to see its going to be their headstone .. bigger than John Holmes'.

Even if you don’t care about privacy, OpenWRT is insane. You can do nutty things. Highly recommended

For the more rookie people, check out routers that are based on openwrt and have rookie GUI.

OpenWRT is great and powerful but unless you are trying to level your networking skills, it can turn into a biatch real quick beyond basic set up.

I just bought the openwrt one a couple of minutes ago after using networkd+hostapd+nixos as my router for more than 2 years.

Also powerful but I reckon if you're at this level then you already know about it; https://opnsense.org/

Any recs for a OpenWRT-supported router? The list is pretty deep

I don't see LibreCMC (https://librecmc.org/) mentioned anywhere in this thread, so correct that.

Unlike Open WRT, LibreCMC is recognised by GNU to be a fully free Linux distribution, and you still get the time-honoured LuCi web administration interface.

LibreCMC runs on much fewer devices as OpenWRT, which can be a feature for those who are overwhelmed by the length of OpenWRT's list.

I don't recommend GL.inet routers. I have the Marble and it is slower than my ISPs router. It has a thing called network hardware acceleration, and it breaks my home server. Services just stop working well with it. So I keep it turned off. When I reported the issue they said it is working for them and came up with a completely hypotical setup..

With AdGuard enabled it frequently froze and I had to reboot it. For some reason even without AdGuard name resolution is noticeably slower. Doesn't matter if I use my ISP's DNS or not.

Also, DynDNS doesn't support custom names, so I installed an alternative service for mywire.org.

Overally, this box came with drawbacks, but no doubt about it is hackable in the good way.

I would like to try openwrt's own router, next time.

I remember the majority of routers in the past could not handle many half-open connections which had very negative impact on torrenting. Asus routers were the only ones that didn't have that limit and i stuck with them since. Is that still a problem that exists?