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Streamline configuring common things.

Just recenty I wanted to quickly create guest wifi on AP. After following a long guide from the official wiki, it didn't work. I probably missed something and could make it work, if I would invest some more time. But instead, I just enabled a hotspot on my phone.

Both AP and router are on OpenWRT.

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evoke4908 a day ago | parent [-]

Honestly, guest WiFi should be a one-click adventure, not a weeks-long trawl through dozens of outdated wiki pages and forum posts from years ago.

Pretty much anything other than the most very basic configuration is unduly difficult.

While it's certainly nice to have every conceivable setting availble to you, only a fraction of a percent of people even know what they're all for or how to apply them.

What OpenWRT needs most of all is for anyone to be able to walk up and find the button that does what they want. Even for technically advanced users and career programmers, OpenWRT is obtuse and confusing. You have to spend hours researching how to do anything even slightly more complex than attaching an AP to a LAN bridge.

	▲	9x39 a day ago \| parent [-]
		Unfortunately, that seems unlikely given OpenWRT (and DD-WRT before them) seem to prefer tinkering than making user-friendly products. It's one thing if it's a simple functional UI on the cheapest hardware possible, but when people are flashing hardware that cost $100, 200, 300 or more, you could have just bought into a more functional ecosystem/OS. Things like Unifi, Eero, and Mikrotik kind of obviate the need for custom firmware with bad UI. It's not 2006 anymore with Linksys WRT54GLs. Guest networks, meshing, tunnels, routing protocols, basic traffic shaping and policing -- these are all point and click or even automatic in these ecosystems to varying degrees, all for less effort than I think you'd spend on a WRT setup. Maybe their future is in low cost embedded boards and not home prosumer gear?