I have noticed that the End of Life / end of updates with GL.inet is really quite short for some products.
It’s great that GL.inet is coming out with more and more great products all the time. GL.inet makes incredible stuff.
But it’s also frustrating that there’s no updates for some routers that were available somewhat recently or may be available, with no clear indication that there will be any update.
I worry about security risks from using a router that doesn’t have any updates for a while. Although some GL.inet users are wealthy, some of us are just tech enthusiasts and can’t always upgrade every 2 years.
The fact that the GL.inet interface isn’t open source means we can’t make the updates on our own, and the best we can do is load OpenWrt, which is much more annoying to use for always on VPN or Tor.
I have a Opal router, and I can update the firmware to the newest beta version, but now it doesn’t work with Tor, and I just bought this in the past year. I hope GL.inet doesn’t create situations like this in the future with lower end models (leaving barely enough room so that future upgrades have to have reduced features). I also have an older GL.inet router that may be more powerful and has Tor in it, but it’s not up to date with firmware and so there could be security risks.
I’m not having an easy year financially and can’t justify buying more GL.inet products, even though the new stuff looks amazing and I want every single new product.
Being able to connect to Tor in an emergency situation (ie, my VPN isn’t working and I want to maintain privacy despite not being able to connect to a VPN) is important to me.
There are a lot of great new features in 4.8.3, but I wish I didn’t have to lose Tor ui or wonder if I can use the older routers without security risks. (I know 4.8.3 is just in beta, but it looks like only limited models will get the upgrade.) If the gl-sdk-ui-tor package was causing instability, the name could be changed to gl-sdk-ui-tor-not-recommended and not installed by default. My experience with the Tor ui is that when i started Tor, it would nearly crash the software and things would freeze, but if I just left it alone, went and made a burrito and had a soda, and then came back and checked, it would be connected. I am okay with the temporary near freeze. It usually didn’t crash completely.