I've been using openwrt since ~2007 or so. It's a marvel & has been so good. But I cannot wait to get off such a special purpose system. I would much rather be

I've been using openwrt since ~2007 or so. It's a marvel & has been so good. But I cannot wait to get off such a special purpose system. I would much rather be running a regular & general purpose OS. I'd rather have systemd and regular builds of packages. Ooenwrt exists mostly because good wifi is coupled to byzantine difficult hardware that requires absurd patches & guesswork to make that hardware useful. There's been no hope for most of these systems to ever get their support up-streamed. We are seeing some positive changes very recently, with for example Qualcomm & MediaTek both seemingly not far from being usable, which is lightyears better than where we have been. Conceivably we could run whatever on these devices at that point. Also super sad is how hard it is to avoid these frustrating quirky devices in the first place. Trying to buy wifi add-ons is enormously challenging. M.2 (or often still mini-PCIe) cards are made by very very few folks, hard to find, and often around $200. Once you acquire one, now you're faced with it's awkward size that won't fit most places, and the often weird power demands like having some 12v lugs you have to hook up. Ideally I'd love to scatter a couple rpi and some usb wifi cards around. It's been a while, but ~5 years ago I was buying & trying every Alfa (a good name that makes usb cards for a variety of chipsets) usb card I could, and usually hosting an AP started great but would quickly fall apart. Realtek only supported like 8 client devices, for example. Other chipsets would crash & even rmmod & re modprobing drivers wouldn't bring the device back up. Some just had terrible performance. It's such a pity USB gets such poor treatment, that there aren't some capable usb cards that can be a decent AP.