Or openWRT.

The bsd based distributions sure are powerful, but with the power/heat budget to match.

I love me some OpenWRT but updating it has always been a risky chore.

Check out attended sysupgrade

Actually, pfsense kind of has a shitty reputation in the FOSS community and opnSense is preferred.

But I don't like the limitations of BSD systems in terms of hardware compatibility and performance, so I build my router using a plain Linux distro (Debian).

That's the first I've heard of pfsense having a bad reputation, can you explain? (I haven't used it, genuinely want to know)

wild read.

sounds like the core of the issue was that Netgate hired a weirdo, and then botched how they handled it when the weirdo got -- go figure -- weird.

and it showed how FreeBSD does commits badly and may not have any (or few) code reviews

honestly makes me feel bad about using netgate boxes -- what else needs to be fixed?

They also did this: https://web.archive.org/web/20160314132836/http://www.opnsen...

And WIPO had to take the domain away from them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PfSense#OPNsense

The soulutions is iptables.

The solution is nftables.

The solution is bpf.

The solution is emacs-m-x-butterfly-bpf.

Better go OPNsense