Any 3rd-Party Firmware Really Worth Installing on R7000?

[AntonK]

Hi,

I know to an extend it depends what your needs are, but is there any really good reason to replace Netgear's stock firmware with a 3rd-party product on the R7000 Nighthawk if you're an average home user who streams HD TV, games, and browses? Do you necessarily lose CTF or any other valuable stock firmware features by going to mod firmware?

I do like to tinker with router firmware, even if just to occupy myself on a slow evening.

Just curious about what some of the senior users who have a better understanding of stock v. mod think.

Thanks,
Anton

 

[Internet Man]

I believe that Tomato variants will retain CTF but mainline DD-WRT would lose CTF.

Advanced Tomato would probably be fun to play with https://advancedtomato.com/downloads/router/r7000

 

[RogerSC]

Haven't looked at this one in a while personally, but it looks like it's still alive. It's called "asuswrt", and it is a port of RMerlin's work on the Asus router line to the R7000. I used this for some time, and it worked well for me. Not sure of the state of CTF with it:

http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/asuswrt-merlin-on-netgear-r7000.71108/

 

[ablatt]

Haven't looked at this one in a while personally, but it looks like it's still alive. It's called "asuswrt", and it is a port of RMerlin's work on the Asus router line to the R7000. I used this for some time, and it worked well for me. Not sure of the state of CTF with it:

http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/asuswrt-merlin-on-netgear-r7000.71108/

Just be aware that the Vortex port of Asuswrit-Merlin is not open source and is hosted on a Russian server. That might mean something or nothing at all.

 

[RogueScholar]

Advanced Tomato would probably be fun to play with https://advancedtomato.com/downloads/router/r7000

Advanced Tomato would be my recommendation as well. I've used it on several devices for over 2.5 years and quite enjoy the interface and feature set. To my knowledge the only thing you'd lose from the stock Genie firmware would be the integration with Netgear's mobile apps. Every other aspect is far superior, and the IPv6 functionality is now pretty much turnkey for most major ISPs and even some regional ones. If you like to tinker, then you'll find endless hours of engagement with just a common USB flash drive and the entware-ng repository. Jacky444, the developer of the front-end, as well as Shibby himself until recently, can be found on another forum and are both real sweethearts when it comes to fielding inquiries.

 

[tarassippo]

Personally, the issue of AdvancedTomato is that it's not a firmware but a GUI for Tomato, which is effectively the firmware and unfortunately it's not updated very often - the latest version v.140 goes back to May 2017... so no security patches since almost 7 months