Merlin to Openwrt (flint2)
Ok so I got burned with Asus tuf be3600, it was buggy connection freezers and vlan bugs. Returned it and after quick search bought Asus be88, flashed Merlin, works like a charm but the main issue isn't sorted still missing coverage in my garden unlike with ild 2.4g Asus running on opentomato.
Last but not least i invested great money in the router where I won't use most of the features it offers. But I'm still running on old Synology ds214se...
So the idea now is to return yet again the Asus be88 and go for flint2 which i can now order from Ali for about 100 euro and use rest of the money to buy a newer NAS.
Spec wise on paper flint2 works great for me tge main question is does it really works well in reality? Can you guys recommend it?
I need one main mlo network, one 5ghz for my tv, and one 2.4 for my iot and car charger. I need two lan vlans, and vlan/pppoe for my wan isp. Some DHCP, mac reservations, USB/5g/lte fail over, some basic fw, ideally some DNS setup to add some blocking DNS and ideally also wire guard client for proton vpn.
It will run about 5 real clients 2-3 wired, glan is enough, and 2-3 wifi clients on WiFi 6. Rest is just noise and iot with about 10-20 small iot devices.
What do you say, will flint2 work for me well? The specs are similar to be3600 which I would happily use but it was Buggy....
P.s. what kind of guy is the flint 2 running with the latest openwrt? Tied luci on my travel cudy and it was a hell to manage.
EDIT: Now I know that I wont sort out the garden coverage with just one AP these days as it was possible in the old days and thats fine I may add additional mesh AP. What is important here is the fact that I currently have a router which is too expensive and complete overkill for my network including the 10ge ports and SFP but I also still run very old NAS which needs deseprate upgrade. This I'm willing to downgrade the router/add AP/mesh if needed and upgrade the NAS.
The current asus I have is abour 300 euro, flint2 is about 100 euro from Ali which seems like a good price to me. The asus TUF BE3600 seemed like a good deal and by numbers it worked well, but in reality it was shitty and buggy. flint2 seem to have similar specs but it runs on opwrt so i rely on the higher sw quality.
Edit2: Got an offer for asus TUF AX600 for 60 euro. Will go for that, basically same HW as the flint2 only the ram and storage is smaller but thats not important for me as I dont plan to run any additional services apart of the basics. As as bonus I'm saving 40 euro, getting Asus gui which i prefer to luci and asus mesh, in case I will feel like the asus fw which seems to be strongly built on openwrt is not enough or has bugs I'm going to flash openwrt, will lose asusmesh but recive long term comunity support.
Seems like win - win to me.