On Thu, 7 Sept 2023 at 12:28, Scott Allen <mlxxxp@gmail.com> wrote:

With OpenWRT, it appears you have to re-install any manually installed
packages after a system upgrade. Another problem with OpenWRT is that
they seem to frequently up the minimum hardware requirements (flash
and RAM) and drop support for older hardware with low resources.

To the best of my knowledge, OpenWRT retains all manually installed packages during system upgrade if you use their "sysupgrade" utility, with the exception of the x86_64 platform. On x86_64, upgrading is indeed a pain. But then there is the "Attended Sysupgrade", which I have not tried yet: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sysupgrade