This is the route I went. After a decade plus of shite consumer routers and finally an EdgeRouter which died (along with Ubiquiti's quality) I bought a Protectli box, build and flashed Coreboot and run OPNSense.
It's been going strong with regular updates (and by regular I mean as regular as your Linux workstation) for over half a decade now.
It wasn't cheap, somewhere in the region of £700 after adding SSD and RAM but it's a way, way overkill model and never exceeds 10% RAM usage and 15% CPU with an IDS running and a bunch of VLANs and Gigabit symmetric WAN.
My original goal for overspeccing it was longevity, but I regret it now, I want to upgrade to 10G+ networking and I can't justify replacing it when it runs so well and wasn't cheap.
This is the route I went. After a decade plus of shite consumer routers and finally an EdgeRouter which died (along with Ubiquiti's quality) I bought a Protectli box, build and flashed Coreboot and run OPNSense.
It's been going strong with regular updates (and by regular I mean as regular as your Linux workstation) for over half a decade now.
It wasn't cheap, somewhere in the region of £700 after adding SSD and RAM but it's a way, way overkill model and never exceeds 10% RAM usage and 15% CPU with an IDS running and a bunch of VLANs and Gigabit symmetric WAN.
My original goal for overspeccing it was longevity, but I regret it now, I want to upgrade to 10G+ networking and I can't justify replacing it when it runs so well and wasn't cheap.