Here's a thing: In Germany, Fritzbox Routers are quite popular (made by http://avm.de). They have excellent software (with a feature set similar to OpenWRT, but more clean and concise). They support guest Wi-fi's out of the box and many people I know use them.
Pi-Hole or the adblock package for OpenWRT are probably better examples. GL.Inet routers are already natively supported by OpenWRT (since their firmware are just custom forks) so one can flash them.
I'd love if it was in my routers, the currently consumer-level routers are so bad I have to purchase based on whether I can replace the firmware with OpenWRT.
I would second the parent, I installed and use OpenWRT on my router without much issue. Flashing and configuring was quite easy, and really the most difficult part was actually getting the router because the local shops (MediaMarkt) don’t have many/any compatible routers.
I switched to using OpenWRT about half a year ago. It is awesome. My router is basically a low-power Linux computer dedicated to networking. I can do whatever I want on it. One pain point for me with OpenWRT is that it doesn't support any decent routers or modem with ADSL. Yes, it does support some of those devices, but without ADSL functionality. And if you're wondering who needs ADSL nowadays, that would be almost everyone who lives in Germany. So the next solution is to run a modem.
Unfortunately, the German router/modem market is monopolized by the FRITZ!Box devices made by AVM GmbH. IMO, it doesn't do a good job of being an ADSL modem as it provides very little technical information on what's wrong with the connection. But it does come with a ton of features that have nothing to do with being a modem or a router such as support for proprietary IoT devices by AVM. Basically, this whole thing is crap. I got FRITZ!Box at first but then sold it. It's quite hard to not use it because all major German ISPs "support" it and encourage you to get it; all those magazines that review devices and rate them promote it; every single electronics store has a big section dedicated to them.
I've settled on using Draytek Vigor 167 as a modem and Unielec U7621-06 as my router. I ordered this router directly from Unielec. I love how modular it is. The Wifi are a separate PCIe modules, and there's a SATA connection on the router for a disk. And Unielec is one of the few companies that support an actual unmodified OpenWRT. And the best part is that it cost about 100$. The downside is that they so far don't support the latest Wifi standards and most of their devices have only 1Gbit ports, which is okay for me.
I agree, or even something like openwrt. This was just to see if it could be done, it’s not the most practical OS for the hardware but it runs pretty well!
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