You guys with your dedicated hardware. :)

I did routing duties for my LAN with my primary desktop for about a decade, variously with Linux, OS/2 (anyone remember InJoy?), and FreeBSD -- starting with 486 hardware. Most of that decade was with dial-up.

The first iteration involved keying in ipfwadm commands from, IIRC, Matt Welsh's very fine Running Linux book.

WAN speeds were low; doing routing with my desktop box wasn't a burden for it at all. And household LANs weren't stuffed full of always-on connected devices as they are today; if the Internet dipped out for a few minutes for a reboot, that wasn't a big deal at all.

I stayed away from dedicated hardware until two things happened: I started getting more devices on the LAN, and I saw that Linksys WRT54G boxes were getting properly, maturely hackable.

So around 2004 I bought a WRT54GS (for the extra RAM and flash) and immediately put OpenWRT on it. This lead to a long rabbit hole of hacks (just find some GPIO lines and an edge connector for a floppy drive, and zang! ye olde Linksys box now has an SD card slot for some crazy-expensive local storage!).

I goofed around with different consumer router-boxes and custom firmware for a long number of years, and it all worked great. Bufferbloat was a solved problem in my world before the term entered the vernacular.

And I was happy with that kind of thing at home, with old Linksys or Asus boxes doing routing+wifi or sometimes acting as extra access points... until the grade of cheap routers I was playing with started getting relatively slower (because my internet was getting relatively faster) and newer ones were becoming less-hackable (thanks, binary blob wifi drivers).

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I decided to solve that problem early in 2020. Part of the roadmap involved divorcing the routing from the wifi completely -- to treat the steering of packets and the wireless transmission of data as two completely distinct problems.

I used a cheap Raspberry Pi 4 kit to get this done. The Pi4 just does router/DNS/NTP/etc duties like it's 1996 again. Dedicated access points (currently inexpensive Mikrotik devices) handle all wifi duties.

That still works very well. Pi4 is fast enough for me with the WAN connections available here (which top out at 400Mbps) even while using SQM CAKE for managing buffers, and power consumption of the whole kit is too low to care about.

The whole OpenWRT stack just plods along using right around 64MB of RAM. VLANs are used to multiply the Ethernet interface into more physical ports (VLANs were used to do this inside the OG WRT54G, too).

It's sleepy, reliable, and performant.

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And it'll keep being fine until I get a substantially-faster WAN connection. For that, maybe one of the China-sourced N150 boxes, with 10gb SFP+ ports, will be appropriate -- after all, OpenWRT runs on almost anything including AMD64 and the UI is friendly-enough.

But there's no need to upgrade the router hardware until that time. Right now, all of my routing problems are still completely solved.