It is fairly easy as for most hardware it is pre configured in a way that makes sense.
Setting it up in a VM is a different story
I am aware of openwrt and used to use when I used router hardware. I have moved to pfsense. I install it on either a 1 liter mini PC or some other older enterprise piece of hardware.
In my experience it's because it's finicky as fuck and requires very specific (and often more expensive) router models, and even then it still crashes just as much as a proprietary os router.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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