OpenWrt: A Linux OS targeting embedded devices

Couldn’t developers of OpenWRT come up with a better UI?

It’s not user friendly at all.

Please for the love of all that is good do not change/remove the Bootstrap 2 LuCI theme. It's such a great and pragmatic design.

I come from OPNSense (different use case). Nice well-designed robust UI, even if people say opnsense is flexible and thus complex.

Given that, I feel GL-inet users rarely visit the advanced section (Luci).

Could you provide any specifics? Are you wanting a dumbed-down UI that hides most of the functionality, or are you wanting the existing functionality to be exposed to the user differently?

What is your point of reference? What would you compare it to?

I find it easy to understand and to use. From my outside perspective it seems like basically just Linux with a nice web UI.

IMO it's valid criticism and at the same time IMO GUIs are unnecessary frills.

If you've tried Cisco routers - you can export ALL configurations by running command `show running-configuration`, or `display current-configuration` on Huawei routers, or `show configuration commands`on Vyatta/VyOS/EdgeOS, which can then be restored onto a brand new router by just right click pasting that log into the ssh session.

That's VASTLY superior to ANY GUI. IMO. YMMV. IANAL. Views are my own. But it is.

Get the Material theme.

It is convenient then that Luci (openwrts web ui) is based on top of uci which is fully exposed through a CLI and/or config files.

All UCI configuration on OpenWRT is stored in /etc/config/, and exporting/importing it is as simple as one scp command. The GUI is great for discoverability, on the other hand.

> It’s not user friendly at all.

Evaluating a return to it from some time in pfSense--it is wonderfully simple. At the same time, its the wrong abstraction for most people who want to manage childrens' devices and iots because it is no abstraction, the operator must know many implementation details that aren't worth knowing outside the system.

There are a couple of Luci themes you can install

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/luci/luci.themes

this is why TNSR was API first with a CLI. https://docs.netgate.com/tnsr/en/latest/basics/config-databa...

We have a lot of requests for a GUI, so one is in development.

See

https://www.wundertech.net/opnsense-vs-openwrt/

To be clear, OpenWRT is a great OS. The UI is a bit old fashioned, existing functionality could be exposed more cleanly, and the terminology could be more intuitive.

This is basically what gl-inet did! You can compare how they expose functionality. Of course, it’s limited, but eventually the remaining features in LUCI could be incorporated in the same UI.