I've been looking to do something similar, but I've been leaning toward the opnsense route with a little htpc with two 2.5G ethernet ports, but haven't pulled the trigger yet.
Mostly because my 10yr old unifi USG still works.
Having switched from a (now Arista) Untangle server I've maintained for 17 years, to a new OpnSense box, I can say it was refreshing, though it comes with a bit of a learning curve. So far I am very impressed with what it can do.
See I only have ISP stuff, and I want to get decent equipment, preferrably nom US unless foss.
GL.inet is HK but opensource.
Opnsense is foss, pfsense is less so. You can install it on pretty much any computer with two lan ports.
openwrt is great for flashing onto router embedded system hardware (check compatability first).
I'm leaning htpc (I'm brand agnostic) mostly because I've had a lot of routers die on me. Unsure why, they just get slower and slower till reboot. Rinse and repeat until even that stops working.
Both for ISP hardware and 3rd party. Not sure if it's planned obscelescence or something else. Which is why I want a pc where I can swap hardware like ram or ssd if things start dying.
All I can find for HTPC is home theatre?
Sorry, I was referring to the form factor. you can hop on aliexpress and search for topton. There's a wide variety to choose from. Some are barebones with no ram/ssd. Some have 6x 2.5G others have spf+ for 10G or a combination. they're small, quiet, energy effecient, and made for being a router/firewall. There are other similar brands, but this will get you shopping in the right direction for what I was referring to.
I've loved my Flint 2. Being powerful enough to run my VPN and a pretty stout adguard home setup has been huge.
Adguard is how I am selling it to my spouse. We never use youtube on tv despite wanting to because of the ads
Adguard still hasn't fixed TV YouTube ads for me. They inject through a different kind of protocol from what I understand. If you can get Smart Tube on your TV through sideloading (I used Jdownloader on android TV) it will be ad free
Balls, I have the tv offline everything through apple tv
IIRC, Merlin is built from the Asus firmware, so Merlin is very stable and somewhat more featureful and secure than Asus vanilla. I have been happy with it for years, having moved off of openwrt and ddwrt.
Merlin does not aim to accomplish the same as something like openwrt, which is a larger project and lends itself to more involved customization and etc.
When it was just me, I could tinker but we were working from home and now we have kids with internet use also.
Basically, I use Merlin because I want more features but i cannot really tinker with it; the WiFi is our production environment. I considered having an internal lab network but it just wasnt worth the overhead.
Community for discussing enterprise networks and the ensuing chaos that comes after inheriting or building one.