On another topic, pretty devestating that OpenWRT runs on only one of these routers, the slowest/oldest one, the Netgear Nighthawk X4S aka the R7800, which dates back to 2016.
In that they need technical specifications and currently-closed source firmware, in a low-margin business, where providing those is last on most companies' priorities?
Or at least, those are needed to enable the latest-and-greatest in a direct hardware path.
Ultimately lot of the issues fall down on Broadcom and Qualcomm being what they are and not even trying to upstream their drivers and other bits.
I don't know if we ever will see another wifi chipset that will have as good and long support as ath9k.
The original WRT54G, for which OpenWRT is named, shipped with a Broadcom brcm47xx chip[1]. But something changed in the last decade, and Broadcom has been unsupportable, unusable, & there is no community, no folks putting their own Linux onto Broadcom based systems for a long time now. I would love to know the specific details, to know what happened. But the status quo is that Broadcom is the worst villian, is unsupportable, that nothing they do is generally usable by hackers & Linux users, and that any router with a Broadcom cpu in it is utterly unusable.
It's worth mentioning that the Broadcom wifi drivers on Linux have been a constant tussle & difficult. For the longest time the MacBook's worst area of support when running Linux was the wifi drivers, owing to Broadcom's dis-support.
I hope some day Broadcom stops being such a dark side impossible company. But there've been no points of hope that I've seen in the last decade. It's just gotten worse. Maybe it's us, maybe we haven't tried hard enough to see what access we might be able to get, maybe Qualcomm has become the main OpenWRT, Debian, &c running chip because it's what folks knew worked, because the long history of Atheros (who Qualcomm bought) being moral & good folks, who understood the relevance & importance of support, and we just haven't tried hard enough to force access to Broadcom, and that's on us. But right now, the status quo is, Broadcom chips are all useless to the world, aside from whatever software comes on them, and whatever software & support you get out of the box. A lot of people are very sad about this, and I recommend also being sad about this.
I was much happier with the Ubiquiti stuff, ipv6 just worked, regular easy updates, and it's been solid.
your mileage may vary. personally i'd rather be running Debian, and have never quite gotten the spare time to try getting Debian going on these systems (i would borrow the kernel & maybe some other packages from openwrt, maybe even kexec in to Debian from openwrt). but openwrt has been low muss low fuss for me since I installed it on a WRT54GS a decade & a half ago. there's certainly some initial uncomfortability learning uboot, understanding what to do. but i've never had to go to any special measures for things to be just working.
did you report any of your issues? are there bug reports for anything you encountered? nothing in what you wrote up sounds right or good or like what i've experienced or would want to. i hope some of these problems got captured.
Ah, yeah, mine was the ac1900 chipset, the r7800 is the newer ac2600.
Lack of Funding, Ads revenue and Interest. The owner has mentioned this multiple times.