Quick straw poll...

Professional sysadmin here (well, I get paid for it)...

I run my routing and filtering VMs with the same generic distro to load into memory what's needed, and provide packaging support, monitoring agents etc; the actual kernel + userlevel parts involved, I build / scripted and package myself.

OpenWrt, VyOS, (MiktoTik) RouterOS; they’re all suited to different tasks. I just wishVyOS had even a basic webUI

OPNsense for firewall, which has a convenient web UI, but OpenWrt on my AP.

I used (virtualised instances of) OPNsense in a recent project because in this particular case I really needed a GUI, but if I have to do something more ad-hoc and/or complex (network namespaces, policy routing, complex firewall rules, remote logging of the conntrack table with ulogd2, BGP/OSPF, VPN setups, etc. etc.) I generally deploy a standard Linux distro.

With a limited amount of systemd drop-in files it doesn't take too much work to set up a system where every config file somebody may want to change is collected in a git-managed directory and a couple of scripts that call git and systemctl restart/renew are all that's needed to switch to a new configuration.

> Dear hobbyist sysadmins of LWN, what software are you using for your networking needs?

MikroTik RouterOS, although I want to switch to something else that supports DHCPv6.

The "big" router is just Ubuntu on a low-end Dell server, but all my APs and various smaller routers are OpenWRT. It's actually a pretty solid distro if you use the image builder to strip out LuCI and all the OpenWRT-specific firewall and other management stuff, and just configure everything in its native config file format.

My router is just an x86 box running Fedora, since forever. It also doubles as my NAS, VM host and media station (it is connected to big screen in the living room and runs Kodi).

I have a WiFi access point, but it merely bridges wireless into home ethernet (DHCP, radv, firewalling, routing runs on Fedora machine). I will get rid of wifi ap as soon as I find cheap, sensible wifi6(e) card working with hostapd.

I like OpenWrt a lot. My ISP supplied modem/router was hopeless as the ISP had reserved port 443 for its own admin control of the devices they supply! No, really, they actually did that and you couldn't undo it. So I bought an old BT Home Hub 5 VDSL2 modem/router for very little and installed OpenWrt. It gives me 100% reliability and lets me apply reasonable firewall rules and do sane port mapping and port forwarding so I can run a few services from home. It's very nice to have a router which runs wireguard, so I can always connect to my LAN and use my home server's services as though I was there. I know many people will be doing all kinds of stuff with OpenWrt but I just needed a modem/router which works like you'd hope it would, which it turns out is about as common as the holy grail in the world of ISP supplied hardware. For non-expert home users projects like OpenWrt and Pi-Hole are a godsend.

I'm in the same boat as bof (as far as job title goes):

At work I use OpenWRT on the APs[1], and I have one of my servers that acts as a NAT router for the service VMs. At home I use OpenWRT, with the router supplied by my ISP in "Modem" mode (no NAT, it hands a public IP to whatever manages to snatch it via DHCP first, which is always my AP). In both cases I don't use OpenWRT's dnsmasq as my DNS server (I run bind DNS in a service VM/Helios 4 respectively), and at home I also have DHCP handled in the Helios 4.

At work one of my most prized features of OpenWRT is its support for VLANs, which have allowed me to do some pretty nifty network segmentation (in conjunction with Managed L2 switches).

I've always tried to buy hardware compatible with OpenWRT (which has luckily been very easy since the early 2010s) and I've never had any real issues (even on TP-Link routers notorious for huge dnsmasq memory leaks on their factory firmware).

[1]: One AP has a public IP and does NAT/DHCP, the others act as bridges. My pie-in-the-sky dream is for a "big" (>= 48 port, or at least >= 24 port) L3 Switch, with non-stingy Flash (at least 64MB, preferably >= 128MB) capable of running OpenWRT (I've seen ports for some L2 switches, but none sold in my country).

Two off-the-shelf home routers (one acts as a router-on-steroids, the other as a not-so-dumb access point), both running OpenWrt.

Kept the verizon fios router (because cable boxes rely on it). turned off the wifi, and hooked up an OpenWRT netgear router to the "south" of it, which supports my wifi and wired LAN. Suboptimal due to double-NAT, but works well enough in practice. I have some creative port forwarding rules (through both boxes) to be able to reach my workstation from the "outside" in an emergency.

I used to care a whole lot more (built my own wifi-enabled router on a soekris board some decade(s) ago), but eventually fatigue caught up with me, and as long as verizon doesn't get to snoop around in my internal LAN, I'm mostly content... :)

ISP's router is crappy (as in default pasword is the last bytes of the MAC address) and costs $20 a month.
Got a TPlink router that is on the HW support list and now I have all the features I always wanted:
Kids are on their own separated network.
DNS resolves DHCP names
Let's encrypt just works
the list goes on

Have been using OpenWRT on x86 hardware (Atom x6425RE and Pentium N6005) for a while, however I'm going to switch to plain Ubuntu soon since this gives me a larger selection of software and ties in better with my suite of ansible scripts. It's a pit of a pain to get things like PPPoE (required for German ISPs) and prefix delegation working on regular Linux distros though.

> Do you just accept and embrace OpenWRT? Or do you eschew specialized hardware&software and do everything by hand with generic Linux distros on generic Linux boxes? Or is it something else?

Option 2, but I kind of got pushed down that route.

My ISP-facing outer wall is a Netgear I found in the trash - worth what I paid for it, frankly - with every possible feature turned off and only functioning as a NAT gateway and modem. I used to have an even older one that I successfully installed OpenWRT on, but it wouldn't sync above 8Mbit. I've got a drawer full of various models (apparently other users of my ISP are dissatisfied with the junk they keep getting sold too) but none of them have useful OpenWRT support and I've bricked a few in trying.

My real router is a normal Linux box on my LAN with a messy hand-rolled nftables setup (tidying it up has become a Forever Project, it'd be much easier if I didn't have to fight nft's parser every step of the way) and everything is shunted through tc-cake, which works amazingly well despite the middlebox.

Off the shelf netgear nighthawk routers + ddwrt. Pretty basic setup, but the repeater functionality lets me use old routers for coverage instead of shelling out for some +$500 meshy stuff.

Using openWRT right now, but considering switching back to Netgear's firmware as it supports automatic updates and upnp works (upnp seems to have been broken in OpenWRT for a few years, at least for my configuration). Also getting the flow offloading on my router CPU to work with OpenWRT is a pain and I really need that or my router can't keep up with my connection.

I am considering switching to one of the intel atom (Denverton or Elkhart/Apollo Lake) based "uCPE" rotuters running vyOS