This is a really hard time to be in that market. I built my own "mesh" system by deploying 3 separate routers in bridge mode, connected via ethernet (lucky tha

This is a really hard time to be in that market. I built my own "mesh" system by deploying 3 separate routers in bridge mode, connected via ethernet (lucky that house was pre-wired). We moved to a house that didn't have that and I used powerline adapters which worked well enough, but once wifi 6 came and the true mesh systems like Google Wifi and Eero put together a system that has much better handoff (by coordinating), open source really just hasn't kept up. The powerline solution kind of sucks because it caps out for me at 20 Mbps (which is very disappointing when scp-ing a file over the LAN!). I've heard people able to get 200 Mbps through powerline, but I haven't been successful. I built a system that just used three routers each with a slightly different SSID, and a script on my laptop that would switch it to the one with the most power once it hit a certain differential threshold. That was honestly my favorite system, and what I plan to do again once my current system retires. My current system is a Protectli 4-port firewall appliance that is running AlmaLinux. It gets CGNATed by my ISP (Starlink) but I set up Tailscale (Headscale) and don't really have any issues now from CGNAT. Cockpit plus plugins provides me a good GUI, although I prefer to just SSH and use the CLI. I have two "wireless access points", one is a Linksys WRT3200ACM: AC3200 (open source edition). It's good, not great. The other is a (swallow) Google wifi. The Google wifi adds a layer of NAT in order to provide mesh. You can avoid that by putting it in hub mode but you lose wireless handoff if you use that. I've been pretty happy with that system for several years, but I'm still on the lookout for something more open that isn't a major downgrade on speed/reliability. I can more or less hot swap any WAP into place since most of the brains/config is in my Almalinux router.