I have many nerdy friends who have been Linux users for ages. But most of them don’t know such a thing as Openwrt exists or have never bothered to give it a try. It’s a very fun piece of software to play with and can be extremely useful for routing traffic. Wondering why it isn’t more popular/widely used.
You can run it on a raspberry pi or an x86 mini pc.
sure, and then you have to make sure you get the correct radio accessories, as the built in pi wifi isn’t going to do so hot acting as the hotspot for multiple video streaming devices.
Radios which you also have to vet against the approved hardware list for OpenWRT, and having multiple channels is even more of an issue with the lack of USB ports (depending on model)
Best thing to do is to get a fanless mini PC with multiple ethernet ports and hook up a decent access point to one of those ports.
Then you’re still looking at a mess of devices and a relatively power hungry system plus you still have your ISPs modem
I need my Internet for work, so I just replaced my ISPs modem with a FritzBox, which is not ideal, but serves me well, gets updates for quite a while and works pretty much always.
then you should get a commercial router compatible with openwrt
Or, I keep using my Fritzbox, which is a single device and does everything I want.
As far as I know, there is no cable modem/router integrated device.
the option i suggested is also a single device.
most commercial routers can run openwrt. you dont need a specialized device.
I still need a cable modem. And as far as I know, none of the ones that can be used with my provider support any other OS.
thats something you would have to discuss with your cable company, and they would probably tell you to fuck right off.
i wouldnt recommend you to mess with that anyway if you dont want to have a variety of problems.