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Comment by sctechie | Hacker News Reader

Let me just get this in before the cries of JUST INSTALL OPENWRT come raining down.

Your mother / father / grandmother / etc are not installing openWRT on their routers. Installing one of these CISCO home routers is pretty much hacking yourself. And, just update the firmware is not gonna work.

Try it one day, go up like 10 people and ask them what's a firmware. If the user isn't technical, you're going to get a 0/10 correct responses.

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>Your mother / father / grandmother / etc are not installing openWRT on their routers.

My mother / father / grandmother / etc are typically not buying the routers. They are saying things like, "next time you visit, can you fix my internet?" Or, "since you're here, can you check what's wrong with the internet? I can't get it to work." which is when you install and configure the xxxWRT device for them.

Maybe they should just ship with the alternative firmware installed if the open source is doing a better job?

I've read (but haven't personally confirmed) that Netgear used skinned OpenWRT on some of their routers (like the wndr3700v1)

It is true http://www.myopenrouter.com/ is their info page. They make it really easy to flash, and provide specs as well so they are well supported so you can use a different version, but it does ship with it too.

Have a look, quite a few mfrs have products that either ship with DDWRT or at least advertise "support" (I guess they mean compatibility?) for DDWRT.

http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Delectronics&...

http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index

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