Having gone through this struggle myself, here's the cheat sheet. You want a device that uses the Linux switchdev driver and is supported by dentOS whether or

Having gone through this struggle myself, here's the cheat sheet. You want a device that uses the Linux switchdev driver and is supported by dentOS whether or not you actually choose to run dentOS on it (I run NixOS on my switch): https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/switchdev.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/networking/switchdev.... https://github.com/dentproject/dentOS https://github.com/dentproject/dentOS Switchdev support means you don't need hardware-specific userspace tools (with their own bizarre syntax to learn) in order to configure the switch. DentOS support means the device uses a sane bootloader (uboot or grub) and the only binary blobs on the device will be the ones built into the bootloader (IntelME, Arm Trusted Firmware) and the switch firmware which will be part of linux-firmware (and therefore very easy to manage/update). In particular, looking for these two keywords is how you make sure that the hardware vendor is staying on "their side of the line" between hardware and software. Violations of this line are endemic to 10G+ switching.