As others have mentioned, the OpenWrt One is great. 2.5Gbps WAN port makes it future proof, currently using it as the gateway for the residential 1Gbps fiber.

Next hurdle is to make ISP upgrade their ONU to have a 2.5Gbps port so I can get ACTUAL 1Gbps out of it, but it will likely also mean they need to upgrade the entire string of GPON equipment, so likely have to wait for a bit.

Also have success with OpenWRT on the ultra low cost Mi AX3600, while hardware acceleration is not supported, it is nice to not have to run out of date Chinese firmware.

I would suggest checking out their Table of Hardware [0]. You can filter it by various fairly detailed criteria.

From my experience, given the local availability constraints, I often only get a handful of practical options to choose from.

For something like a successor to TP-Link Archer C7 with WiFi 6 support, I have chosen TP-Link Archer AX23 [1] and it seems okay to me so far as a cheap wired-to-wireless edge device.

[0] https://openwrt.org/toh/views/start

[1] https://openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/archer_ax23_v1

As previous owner of Archer C7, Archer AX23 barely upgrade if you want to install additional packages as it have same 16/128 flash/memory configuration just like C7.

Personally I upgraded to xiaomi Router AX3200 with 128/256 flash memory configuration and 4:4 MIMO, though it lacks USB and have WAN+3LAN ports compare to usual WAN+4LAN.

For routing, x86 is going to have the best perf for CPU intensive tasks like QoS. For wireless, mediatek is well supported upstream. WiFi is wifi 6 only though. Wifi 6E and 7 are in the works but will take a while to stabilize. My set up is an old lenovo thinkcentre nano IoT box as the router and netgear wax220 as AP, both running openwrt.

WiFi 6E works fine on OpenWrt, it's just that there are only two routers supported in ToH SmartRG SDG-8733 and SDG-8734. It works out of the box (I tried just as a test) on my MT7922 (RZ616) card in my PC.

Who sells them? I don’t see any in stores.

There is also the router made in partnership with OpenWRT, the OpenWRT One. I’m using one right now and it has been very stable just on the RC builds for this release for a few weeks now. This is the first actual release supporting this device. The device itself is pretty nice with a JTAG header on the board so it's pretty clear that it is a hacker-friendly device. Haven’t needed to use that yet though…

I just get a small x86 box and then buy stand alone POE access points for wifi.

Same. NixOS with some cheap 2.5G ethernet cards and a ubiquiti AP.

Power draw is pretty low and I don't have to deal with yet another ecosystem.

Don't misunderstand me, I've used OpenWRT on many things including an original WRTgl, but I'd rather something boring these days.

For Wifi, things with the ath9k was the gold standard for a while, though then Qualcomm bought Atheros, but supposedly the followup ath10k/11k/12k drivers are decent too.

Mediatek MT76xx/79xx (mt76 driver) are also considered very good.

See https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/blob/main/home/USB_WiFi... (yes this is specifically about USB adapters, but usually the same driver is used for built-in WIFI in access points as well)

https://wireless.docs.kernel.org/en/latest/en/users/drivers....

This release also supports the latest Realtek RTL8169 drivers, popular with inexpensive mini PCs. Great job, OpenWrt Team!

I replaced my Archers with glinet Flint 2 devices.

For those that may not be aware if you are interested in the Flint 2 but havent purchased yet Glinet is releasing the Flint 3 soonish (they have a product page up saying coming soon). Not much is known about it other than it will be wifi 7 compatible

https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-be9300/

It's using Qualcomm IPQ53xx, so will take a while before it's supported by Linux/OpenWrt. I don't think even IPQ50xx has been merged yet.

Edit: http://download.gl-inet.com/releases/qsdk_v12.5/kmod-4.7/be9...

It should be noted that GL-Inet does not support or is affiliated with OpenWRT in any way. More on that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285923

GL-Inet Flint2, maybe?

Just got 2 of these a few days ago and am super happy with them. The firmware it comes with is essentially OpenWRT with a fancier UI so that means that you can use an OpenWRT sysupgrade image to flash it to OpenWRT with no issues. WiFi6 and Hardware Flow Offloading (HFO) are super nice features of this particular router. Downside is that it has 4 1G LAN ports and 2 2.5G (1 WAN, 1 WAN/LAN) ports, so you're kind of stuck with gigabit.

I use a flint2 as the router for my 2Gbs internet connection, a Wireguard VPN server and to provide network connectivity for devices in my garage which is where the router lives.

I use the 2.5Gbs WAN/LAN port to uplink it to a switch in my basement where all my cabling terminates and a small rack lives. This switch then provides a mixture of 2.5, 5 and 10Gbs ports.

The point being that the flint2 doesn’t limit me to 1Gbs.

I needed to answer that question a month ago. The One felt too untested. Most people recommend the Flint2, but it felt expensive. So I landed on the asus RT AX53U

GL.inet makes routers with a fork of OpenWRT. The actual OpenWRT is only a flash away (you can flash the upgrade directly from the stock firmware). Their products are very solid and I will probably buy routers exclusively from them going forward.

Asus RT-AX89X works pretty well with OpenWRT now (make sure it's revision B, avoid any A revisions).

But if you want 10 Gbps for wired connection with upstream support, you need something else (like DEC750 which has no wifi).

It depends on the features you want. My approach is to search in their supported devices, and sort by ram.