If you aren’t familiar with LEDE, don’t feel alone. It’s an embedded Linux based upon OpenWRT’s foundations.

I’ve been a fan of OpenWRT for years- it follows the Debian “Unencumbered” design (which is why it supports less devices than DD-WRT or Tomato), and leaves it up to the administrator of the device to configure it as necessary, rather than throwing in many unnecessary features or other assorted bloat.

I opted to try it on the most “baseline” system available, my ancient Airlink 101 AR-670W. This base model router has 4MB flash, and 32MB RAM, which was awesome a decade ago- not so much now.

The interface for LEDE is familiar for any OpenWRT users, and LuCI is essentially unchanged to the naked eye.

It uses a Linux 4.5.x kernel base, and as such does make the old 280Mhz CPU a little slower to start, and does have a bit more overhead. However, the problem I have with it is that it:

♦ Is not compatible with OpenWRT configuations, but blindly accepts and installs them

Granted, there should be some differences moving forward, but it will still accept a standard OpenWRT configuration backup, and obliterate itself with two clicks, requiring a config rebuild. I tried this after it pulled the next stunt on me- just to see what it would do.

♦ Various new driver/configuration issues exist

With OpenWRT Chaos Calmer (15.05.1), this machine works perfectly, allowing me to set my own MAC addresses for any physical interface. Under LEDE 17.01, it accepts the data, but continues to send the hardware MAC address- which annoyed my provider’s DHCP Radius with it’s constant requests for a couple minutes’ time, prompting them to null route me for a couple hours while I got to enjoy dealing with it.

I like that it’s a step forward with a newer code base. Hopefully in a few releases, it’ll be a worthy adversary to Tomato and DD-WRT.