Hello there,
To work with Gigalan and all it's wonderful capabilities, is it better to use a un-managed switch in front of the PI or should i buy USB to Ethernet adapters and whats the difference then?
Thanks in advance.
The "one armed router" requires a managed switch, since it works by sending WAN and LAN packets in and out of the single Pi port on different VLANs. This setup is practical for most use cases, and is a more streamlined hardware arrangement. At very high ISP speed a separate USB WAN port would prevent bottlenecking on the single cable.
If you use USB adapter(s) with a single network on each cable (WAN on one, LAN on another) then you can expand the LAN network with an unmanaged switch. But at some point you will probably want multiple LANs (trusted, guests, Things, etc) so a managed switch is needed there as well.
These days when buying a switch just get a managed one.
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Ok then i will use the adapter + a dumb openwrt router as switch
Thanks for the advice.
I'm quite happy the performance is VERY good with the PI! great.
Dumb OpenWRT routers make good managed switches as well. I had both a 5-port port dumb switch and an AP in my living room, made some VLAN changes that required a managed switch but before I bought one it dawned on me I could consolidate all the requirements on a 5-port wifi router that I already had. Works perfectly.
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I'm quite happy, i'm getting 900 on a single ip with wireguard and 1,2GB on the rest...cant complain.
Quite fast and stable! The AP WIFI6 that is connected to the switches is also very very nice!
Much better than these WIFI6 routers with crap software 
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