I am looking for a router, and OpenWRT came up. I was looking at their table of hardware and the ASUS RT-AC3100 seemed like a good option, as its cheap used, (~$40 USD) and supported by the latest OpenWRT version.
Thing is, its EOL, per Asus. Does this mean that it won’t be supported on OpenWRT for much longer?
Is there a way to see or estimate when a router will no longer work on OpenWRT?
Yes, OpenWRT lasts way longer. Main thing that ends support is hardware requirements. My old devices with only a few megabytes of memory got dropped eventually. Not because of the chipset, a modern OpenWRT would just not fit any longer. I rarely see other reasons for them to discontinue updates.
ha, some of them can even be upgraded to fit if you can do a little soldering
it could be easier though to make a slimmer custom build, without luci and other noncritical things
i did it on my old tp link back then and it wasn’t so hard with a half decent soldering iron.
i think openwrt now lets you customize it and remove packages ootb iirc?
well there’s a firmware selector page, wherr you can request additional packages. maybe it can also be used for removing some?
but if you build it yourself you can do any changes you want, too
Sure. Sadly I don’t have the proper tools around to do that. And in my case I wasn’t too sad. These devices had 100mbps ethernet and a slow wifi standard. Now they’re on e-waste and I got an upgrade to Gigabit ethernet and 5GHz wifi 😆