I'm in the market for a new all-in-one wireless ap. Which manufactures seem to best support the open source community? Is there a Wi-Fi chipset that its support stands out as complete and robust?
My thinking is without quality supported Wi-Fi that everything else in the system is irrelevant.
Ath9k is the best supported, though getting old now.
Then ath10k, then mt76
they never will be old
Compared to what 802.11ac and 802.11ax bring to the table in terms of raw performance (both the wireless throughput and the CPU performance (~= routing throughput), flash size and RAM size that go hand in hand with the newer wireless chipsets), 802.11n (~= ath9k) has indeed gotten very old by now. Yes, there is a quite major advantage for ath9k on the driver side, but that doesn't really mean much in comparison to contemporary performance.
As an aside, in summer I had to use a few systems (fast x86_64 workstations, with plenty of storage), which are normally hard-wired to my network, over wireless for a couple of months, because wifi is usually unecessary in these devices, they only had old (ath9k based-) ar9285 (1x1) and ar5008 (2x3:2) equipped - this was not a pleasant experience at all. In comparison, (slower-) systems using ax200/ ax210 Intel (client-) cards remained usable almost without restrictions (a little more laggy, but very decent performance), both in a 802.11ac environment (AP) and in a 802.11ax environment (AP). Admittedly, 2.4 GHz vs 5 GHz and HT20 vs HT40/ VHT80/ HE80 also left their mark, but even 802.11ax over 2.4 GHz (HE20) was a very noticable difference to the better.