I am an absolute niche but I'd love to see better x86 (well, x64) support

OpenWRT absolutely blows PFsense/OPNsense out the water in my experience. I don't need a bajillion different configuration options, I just want a tiny PC that can route packets effectively and maybe do a bit of port forwarding. But won't keel over and die when I download lots of "Linux ISO's" on my fiber internet connection

I dropped PFsense after the Wireguard debacle where they tried to force broken code into the FreeBSD kernel [1] OPNsense meanwhile ate its own EFI boot partition after a system upgrade and rendered itself unbootable. Not great!

OpenWRT on x64 feels more like a "test system" than something to run in production. Being able to upgrade-in-place until recently was "just dd the disk image to your target boot drive!" instead of having some way to properly install or upgrade the system

Despite this it also still limits itself to about 100MB for the rootfs partition. The SSD I've installed is some junk 60GB no-name brand, so I guess I'm safe as long as it can do wear-levelling. But when OpenWRT themselves have devices with gigabytes of eMMC flash supported it feels a bit restrictive for a default.

Due to being optimized for routers with tiny flash and memory everything is broken up into as many tiny pieces as possible as well. Want to run hostapd? There's about 4 different options for which hostapd you want. Want a web UI? Well install LuCI via opkg/apk. Nothing comes "batteries included" so much as it comes "individual lego pieces"

I love OpenWRT. It's built like an absolute tank and yet is simple enough to make even the most in-depth changes absolutely easy. If they were willing to push upward into more standard x86 kit they'd give PFsense and its contemporaries a serious challenge. SmoothWall, IPCop and all the others have long since died out for "free Linux router/firewall appliance"

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...

"I am an absolute niche bu I'd love to see better x86 (well, x64) support"

I'll second that, maybe not for the same reasons.

I have numerous static binaries built for x86-64 that I would like to be able to use on new OpwenWRT installs. Because the OpenWRT x86-64 support is lacking I only use it on MIPS and cross-compile or, if it is a tiny program, compile natively on the router (slow). And I stick to NetBSD for x86 routers.