With that in mind, what non-Chinese routers/equipment are decent enough for the average home/SOHO user? To keep the question on topic, I may install Linux on an old laptop if it's salvageable. If I'm able to do it, I may as well get the right networking equipment for it from the start. If not, I'll know what to use when I start updating and replacing networking gear moving forward.
So... the "convenient for normies and/or the tech-literate user who's unafraid of flashing custom firmware," the answer is "any reasonably modern ASUS router." My rationale goes like this:
1.
ASUS is a Taiwanese company, and therefore is not directly subjected to any of the Communist Party's whims. I'd prefer to buy American, but beggars and mildly concerned netizens with minimal wherewithal to fiddle with shit can't be choosers.
2.
The standard firmware that ASUS routers ship with is a hybrid Linux affair. The Linux kernel and the bulk of the userland tooling is under the GPLv2, plus there's other FOSS licensing for shit like Busybox, dnsmasq, and OpenVPN. Of course... all the juicy stuff like drivers, hardware acceleration, that Trend Micro AiProtect bullshit they do, all that shit is hard proprietary.
3.
There's a robust aftermarket firmware scene for ASUS routers since the upstream source is mostly FOSS and the blobs themselves freely distributable. Asuswrt-Merlin is the most popular aftermarket firmware for ASUS routers. Per their "
features" page, most of their work amounts to patches, bugfixes, updating components to the latest upstream, support for cron jobs, and other stuff along those lines. ASUS themselves
have mainlined changes that the Asuswrt-Merlin team made, so there's a
certain amount of trust you could put into them. There are rebuilds of Asuswrt-Merlin that support more obscure models that the Merlin team proper either can't or won't support, but that's a different story for a different day.
4.
They're available in almost every physical retailer throughout America. Best Buy, Micro Center, Target, Walmart, Staples, OfficeMax, Costco, BJs, basically any major retailer that either focuses on consumer electronics
or has a tech department
somewhere. You
could buy the bullshit nondescript sub-$100 router...
or you could just buy any given ASUS router that retails for $150-$200. Sometimes, last year's top-end model gets dropped down to this year's midrange, with a handsome sale discount. If you're open to buying secondhand, you could even scour Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, or eBay for used ASUS routers. The
supported device page is modest enough, and you can easily do a bit of Googling to see which model tickles your fancy
and is within your price point.
It's not perfect, there's tons of nuances to be had with everything I brought up, and more to the point: it betrays the dogma of free software by allowing coexistence with proprietary components, especially blobs that are intimately tied to the proper function of the hardware itself.
BUT... for the nearly-braindead meat puppets who
finally wanna take
some action without
too much effort, the ASUS router path is
probably the one that'll give you the most return for the least possible effort. Plus, the ceiling to fiddle with it is sufficiently high enough to be tempting without being intimidating. This is arguably the most sensible option for 99.99% of people, even if they're never gonna flash Asuswrt-Merlin.
***
Of course... if you have the wherewithal, you can go wholly self-hosted, starting with a pfSense router paired with an ethernet switch and distinct access points.
Self-hosted guide here.
