I love MikroTik, but ffs just let me install something else on it. SONiC or any other Linux would be awesome. I love their hardware, but their software is absolutely awful.
Is there any manufacturer out there who produces high quality hardware that is not locked down?
You can easily install openwrt on most of MikroTik routers. Rb5009 is also supported now if you need more powerful router.
https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/rb5009ug_s_in
Four devices is not "most". You had me excited that I might be able to abandon the proprietary UIs on my CRS326/CSS326. And I know those aren't the "real router" devices, but Mikrotik certainly refers to them as routers.
Here is complete list -> https://toh.openwrt.org/?view=normal
78 devices in total when you filter for mikrotik -> brand column.
Oh damn. I had just gone up one level from your first link (to https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/start) and saw a small list of 4. RB450 was on there (which I used to run), so I figured it was mostly accurate.
That table is a much longer list! Still no love for my CRS/CSS, but it does look like that's probably most of the RB devices that Mikrotik actually intends for use as routers (rather than L3 switches).
Sometimes having generic Linux capabilities on network equipment makes it hard to understand the configuration. On RouterOS you can just /export the configuration and read a single file. On Linux/SONiC there are multiple ways to do the same thing - you can do one part of configuration using ifupdown, then make some changes in systemd-networkd, a bunch of shell-script DHCP client hooks, rc.local, cron @reboot. Imagine being handed over a router that someone has fixed by doing some runtime reconfiguration (like `ip ro replace default via 192.168.0.1 advmss 1410`) that would vanish with almost no trace (except maybe .bash_histotry) when you reboot it - that won't be possible (without doing very special scheduler/script trickery) on RouterOS.
But if you still want it, MikroTik doesn't try too hard to prevent you from running modified software. You can port OpenWrt, and most modern MikroTik devices use modern enough Linux to use a device tree blob. Try pulling out a dtb from your firmware and ask an LLM to do the initial porting - just don't forget to backup your RouterOS license key first, they are device specific.
The opnSense Deciso boxes are very nice and open - if a bit on the expensive side.
https://shop.opnsense.com/product-categorie/hardware-applian...
> if a bit on the expensive side.
chokes on coffee
From my old-man, everything-is-stupidly-expensive point of view, this is my scale:
cheap side | reasonable | expensive side | Deciso boxes
I'm not disagreeing but they are quite powerful and fanless, with generous networking ports and both RAM and SSD can be upgraded.
I haven't been able to find many other devices that tick so many boxes. These seem to exist on a class of their own.
Yep, and I can't disagree with that either, they know their niche (and know they're niche) and are catering to it.
Having said that, mikrotik hardware running OpenWRT feels like something that might scratch one of my itches.
Yeah all fair. I actually got a Dec740 second-hand (I think it belonged to a small company that either folded or grew out of it) for a reasonable price, upped the SSD and the RAM, and now I'm building a router "platform" on top of Incus.
The idea is to run OpenWRT passing through the ISP NIC and one (or both) of the SFP+ ones going to the switch, and also run other services in isolated containers.
I'm even thinking about putting Home Assistant on a VM on it but I'm not sure yet what impact it will have on routing performance so that's on hold for now.
It's so much more powerful than what I need for the router/firewall that it should be comfortable to run quite a few things on it, and I can start moving them off it to other devices if Internet speeds catch up to it in the future.