I am looking for a router, and OpenWRT came up. I was looking at their table of hardware and the ASUS RT-AC3100 seemed like a good option, as its cheap used, (~$40 USD) and supported by the latest OpenWRT version.
Thing is, its EOL, per Asus. Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
Is there a way to see or estimate when a router will no longer work on OpenWRT?
Check out GL.iNet products. They’re all based on OpenWrt with a more beginner-friendly GUI on top. (LuCi can be installed via a few clicks.) And very affordable. Some can be flashed to vanilla OpenWrt as well.
GL.Inet products that use Mediatek chipsets are great since you can usually flash standard OpenWRT on them. I would avoid routers with different chipsets since they are unlikely to get proper support.
(Though I can’t say that my MT-6000 is cheap, but it is an extremely capable router. That is top of the line though, they have cheaper stuff.)
Looking at you Flint 3 DOWNGRADE!!!
Yeah, the Flint 3 seems like a worse overall router when it comes to computational power and chipset. The only thing it has going for it is WiFi 7 (instead of 6) and 2.5 G ethernet on all ports. The Flint 3 is also more power hungry, which isn’t great given the high energy costs in Europe.
Most people don’t benefit from WiFi 7 (WiFi 6 is already good enough for almost everything) and if you want more than 2x 2.5G ports, consider getting a (managed) switch to extend the router with.
Not to mention how apparently 2.5 and 5ghz bands suffer on the Flint 3 just to get Wifi 7.
Hope no one’s buying them (though I imagine a lot of people see 3 > 2 and blindly trust it’s better in all cases).
Flint 3 probably would’ve been better as a different product line. As it currently stands, It seems a bit misleading to attach it to the Flint 2 when so much is different at its core.
This. I looked at a bunch of options and these are the best for OpenWrt and are very reasonably priced. Mine did torrenting, VPN, and a few other small services before I got my proper served up and running and now it is less loaded and more relaxed without that workload. Absolutely awesome, very high quality for low price, and it comes with a very slightly modified OpenWrt firmware which is unlocked by default.