As title say, im on openwrt on an r8000 and its working fine with some minor spots at home with shaky coverage, minimal drops now and there on those spots only, at the begining i installed openwrt on it because i was using several side opkg and now im using a proper server with a lot of dockers so i have nothing extra installed on the router its just working as a dumb ap (exept for ddns that i can move to the server in minutes), and i knew for years about the issues with the open source wifi drivers on this router, it is better to stay on openwrt in my use case or im better at stock? Does netgear still issue security updates to this router? Is it already EOL? Is it secure to go back to stock vs stay on openwrt in this case?
There's no alternative to just trying…
Just some general ideas:
- bcm53xx doesn't get that much attention on OpenWrt
- brcmfmac is not as unproblematic than more common chipsets
- the devices are rather old at this time, meaning you may be faced with aging hardware causing its own set of problems
- OEM support for older devices isn't endless
Did You tried tomato? But yes this is a very good time to start looking for new hardware.
Ive seen Freshtomato too, is it better than openwrt on this hardware? is it better maintained than stock? or you mean some other tomato flavour, all others seem outdated. im most concerned about security than speed, not paranoid, but more in the line of "better safe than sorry"
Works good and fresh tomato is still maintained, performance is also nice. I personalny use pfsense because of security and nice gui.
It is also supported by DDWRT.
Both Tomato and DDWRT use the native Broadcom drivers
The R8000 doesn't seem to be out of support yet according to Netgear's EoL list https://www.netgear.com/about/eos/
But that doest mean too much and i don't think Netgear provide projected EoL dates