I use their yellow mini router with 2x Ethernet and 1x WiFi 2.4 just as a media converter between WiFi and Ethernet for the laser printer that is too far from an Ethernet plug. That printer doesn’t have a WiFi card natively so instead I use that router to act like it. It’s a stony hello box, powered by usb (directly off the printer, this HP laser jet has a USB port to add storage to it) It runs openwrt internally from the factory, and you can click “advanced” to access LuCI and openwrt. It has one button to set it to WDS repeater and pass dhcp through. It’s pretty good, and I have no complaints.
I have one of their dual-channel mini routers, the GL-AR750. The preinstalled OS is a fork of OpenWRT that comes bundled with Wireguard, Samba, and several other useful programs, but the package repository doesn’t have the variety of the OpenWRT repository.
The hardware is fully supported by the OpenWRT project, so installing plain OpenWRT is easy.
But it’s still a relatively slow device (650 MHz MIPS 24Kc) with throughput well below 100 Mbps when encrypting. The faster GL-AR750S is still well below 100 Mbps when encrypting. That’s the tradeoff of a small and cheap device that can be powered by a USB 5V power adapter.
The more annoying part is that the 5 GHz WiFi has not been certified for DFS, and therefore DFS channels are disabled.
