u/Schroinx

I need to replace my TP-Link 1g wifi 6 AP & router in a not so distant future. Live in a condo. The first choice would be to replace it with an AP and a separate opensense box, that could do vlans, Pihole etc, and a Mikrotik 10G SFP+ switch, but no point in replacing one China box with another, and for now my inet is 1G base-T, not justifying high spending. The past time has revealed a lot of secuirty flaws in routers, and esp Netgear and TP-Link, or just that they stop updating them. Some has been intelservices that has been revealed with the new AI tools, & we will likely see more of that. I don't need wifi 7.

The second idea was to replace the router 6 AP w a openWRT that is close to the one I have, also non-China and non-US, & also Mikrotik switches, but then the switch would have to do the vlans, as WRT should not be good for that. If there anything I should be aware of in that mix, eg Mikrotik switches and ioenWRT?
Here I have found the Zyxel T-56 which can be gotten for 75€, so it fits my needs. from Taiwan.

Third idea, is how good are Mikrotik's routeros compared to the above, and should that be something I should also consider for the AP-router box?
Regrettably, Mikrotiks R&APs has 2.5G in, and then 1G LAN ports, but as my inet it here it does, using cables for them individually, eg 3 cables is not high WAF... I have a switch a different place, not on the wall. This is a strange choice, when a 2.5g port on the LAN side too does not cost that much and here the CPU should be able to route 2.5G.
Do any of their router-APs support openWRT? That would also ensure a long life, even after official support.

After I moved the motherboard to a new case, I accidentally destroyed the CPU fan plug, so the fan no longer functions. Thats not much of an issue as I am mainly using it for web and youtube. Id did however wear out my SDD, I fear, due to it being too hot. I have replaced the SDD with a spare I had, but to avoid the same happening to the new old, are there anything I can do? Also, is it due to the outer lower casing not tucing the SSD when I closed it? Can I set the SSD to be more curtail at a lower temp or something like that? I also have one of these SSD adators that will allow me to use another NVME M.2. That could also be a way...

How good is Byhyve compared with Proxmox? And jails w docker/containers? Are there webmin?

Is KDE Plasma due to the lack of login not continued?

I have a media server where I would like to have one common sttorage pool, ideally something like mergerFS. It would then be copied to another so there is a mirror on a backup server. The file system should ideally be ZFS, with some JBOD functionality. Each server would have a full copy of the data & the HDs would be same size. The main server would then propagate all changes to its storage pool the mirror server & its HDs, say each day.

EDIT: I forgot fan control and low power use, as it resides in a condo.
EDIT 2: LLMs have revealed what are likely intel services backdoors to Linux systems. How is this for BSD?
EDIT 3: I plan on getting a Asrock B650D4U and AM5 cpu for the server.

I am one of the W11 refugees and also digital sovereignty, and I am looking at changing that to a different OS. I am superuser on windows, & dos before that. 😄 So I am not scared of a shell once in a while. However for my home media/file server, I had decided on openSUSE w plasma, so I could also remote in a use it for work the (older macos) laptop is too small for. I use Windows App. I don't need the stability of Debian, as I can update the box once in a while and reboot it. Normal maintenence. So openSUSE rolling release TW was initial idea, but after seeing a lot of BSD vids, I have seen a BSD box can the same, but as one said, in Linux you have to relearn when they change things, while in BSD you also most do as you are used to, so little new learning and native ZFS for the files, and now also Plasma, so v15 is what I need, and it seems I can use jails/containers & byvye, if needed. The media server soft Emby I have is ported to BSD. Hopefully it can be brought to idle as low as Linux.
What I am in doubt of, is that there is not rolling release? I would like to install it, and the be able to run it for years without reinstalls of it all? Can one update from one release to the next or what do you suggest?
EDIT: I am in the planning/research fase, so I can chose either way, as the software and functions seems to be available on both Linux and BSD.
EDIT2: Thx for the quick responses. I'll try w BSD first, as it seems it can be upgraded also.