has anyone heard of IPFire 2.27 & Core Update 171 is it safe an how does it compare to
opensense , pfsense , firewalla an truenas an can i also use it to replace the os on my
old TP-Link AC4000 Tri-Band WiFi Router (Archer A20) like DD-WRT, OpenWRT , Tomato
I have tried IPfire in the past and settled on OPNsense over it. There just wasnt enough hardware support in IPfire for me, and less of a community so it was harder to find some information I needed. And lastly, it required more manual tweaking to get things like an XBox one working with it. Apparently XBox does (or did) “weird stuff” with networking and the default way IPFire was set up didnt allow it to work. The guy behind IPFire is a really great person, and the team tries to help with user issues when they can, but there are simply too many issues out of the box IMO.
I chose OPNSense over PFSense because the community at PFSense is full A Holes, and the company that owns PFSense is a bit shady. They make claims about what PFSense is that are simply untrue, and have banned a couple dozen people who called them out on their BS.
OPNSense has the largest hardware support, as PFSense deliberately rips out some hardware drivers from their distro.
Another option is Untangle (Now just called NG Firewall), though this costs money even for home use if you run any kind of normal home network. This is like $150 for a year for the version you would want (150 device limit and comes with BitDefender antivirus scanning of all traffic passing through the router). The Home Basic has too low of a device limit for a normal household these days, especially if you have any “smart” appliances. This distro is the best IMO due to its feature set, just have to decide if $150 a year is worth paying.
You cannot install these on a consumer router like DD-WRT. Many routers are MIPS processors which I know none of these firewall distros have compatibility with, and I dont think most even have ARM support. They are meant for x86 PCs.
ProtectLi makes great little boxes that work with these sorts of operating systems though:
thanks for the info that helps