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OpenWRT support does not come free. There are volunteers that need to spend lots of their personal time so that a consumer router may get reasonably good support in OpenWRT.

Whole range of chipsets with no free software support are immediately excluded from OpenWRT.

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> Whole range of chipsets with no free software support are immediately excluded from OpenWRT.

True, but it reminds me of where printer support used to be in Linux, say, 20 years ago: Lots of shitty printers weren't supported. Sometimes, yeah, that's a deal-breaker, but if you're in a position where you can buy one, plenty of good hardware is fully supported.

GPUs are a much better analogy than printers. Broadcom WiFi occupies the same status as Nvidia GPUs: #1 in the market, hostile to open source, but their main competitors work fine on Linux without the hassle of closed-source driver blobs.

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