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 used hardware from the landfill. As long as it has more than 32mb of ram and no broadcom you are good.
You can find old hardware for free if you go dumpster diving. If that isn’t an option you can pickup a device for $100 USD