Hello it's year 2018 now and a lot of things changed in router firmwares.
Image via https://www.maxpixel.net/Fritzbox-Wireless-Router-Wlan-Switch-Computer-1426767
I prefered DD-WRT for a long time, because it was easy to use via the web user interface and still had a lot of features that are not possible with the stock firmware of my router.
But since some days ago I was thinking about changing the DD-WRT firmware to OpenWrt.
The reason for that was because of the following bad things you get with DD-WRT:
- no good documentation for new parts of DD-WRT. The wiki is so bad and outdated you can't find help with new stuff like IPv6 and how it's handled with the newest firmware. Just old information from i don't know some years ago, that are not needed anymore.
- Beta versions are sometimes really buggy and let you go crazy. I had this some time ago when I tried to update to the latest version, because I wanted to have the latest stuff (security patches ...) but my complete WAN connection didn't work anymore. Also sometimes I had some issues with the wi-fi connection. The maybe only possible way to avoid this would be to use the release version which is actually also some years old. So a no go.
Those points let me switch to OpenWrt. It was actually very easy to switch from DD-WRT to OpenWrt by just finding the right router firmware of OpenWrt on their site and installing it via the DD-WRT UI upgrade functionality. (I am not responsible if you brick your router ;) )
If this doesn't work for you, you could also try changing your boot partition if your router supports more boot partitions.
If so you could just ssh to your router (user: root, pw: yourUIPassword) and execute this command:
ubootenv get boot_part
it shows your current partion and the available ones.
Now switch to the other one with:
ubootenv set boot_part 1 <-- number of the other partition
and reboot afterwards:
reboot
Now to OpenWrt:
Once I saw that the user interface (it's called: LEDE) and the backend OpenWrt merged some months ago and so you get everything packed together in one firmware, I wanted to give it a try.
No regret so far. Its perfect. Everything looks smooth, easy to use and you can even add software by extending the main one. That's something you could not do with DD-WRT it had everything packed in one big firmware without extensions. (actually via ssh you could add new applications somehow but not easy like OpenWrt)
With OpenWrt this is much simpler and they have some let's call it "app store" for adding new functionality like VPN to your router firmware.
The stable versions are also much more stable than DD-WRT (what I noticed so far, maybe this will change)
and if you are more into the latest stuff out there you could even use the dev version. (which I would not recommend for daily use)
So if you are now thinking about which firmware you should use for your router and you are from 2018 and above. Try OpenWrt. I still think DD-WRT is good and has everything you need and I also heard good things about Tomato (another well known firmware, what I know is perfect if your router has low resources) but in the end in my opinion OpenWrt wins over all of them.
If you still using stock firmware of your router manufacturer, than consider changing to OpenWrt for more powerful use and more/quicker security updates.
Thank you for reading.
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Thanks a lot for the practical comparison! I'm thinking on getting a new router as my Cisco RV340 doesn't have proper IPv6 support and neither SSH access, and wanted to start by choosing the OS to add on it.
Since it'll be a new router, I'll just get one with enough resources to run OpenWRT + pihole!