Their software It's incredibly powerful, but also quite opaque to someone not into hardcore networking. I setup a small private WISP using their gear and configuring it was pretty rough for a non networking nerd. It's not running Linux, but a custom OS. The quickset is handy, but as soon as you want to do something slightly different, you're up to your neck in low level config. Still great HW and if you know how it can do everything you need. Ubiquity gear has a friedlier interface.
Mikrotik gear absolutely runs Linux. It just uses a custom userland.
Ubiquity gear is structured the same way: It, too, absolutely runs Linux, and it uses a custom userland.
One of these userlands is friendlier than the other, but they're both still Linux.
It's a tale as old as the hills, or at least as old as the OG Linksys WRT54G
-- which was my own first foray into owning dedicated routing hardware ~20 years ago (which was -- guess what -- Linux with a custom userland). (Previous to that, I used Linux with the userland of my choosing on my desktop PC.)
The biggest life changer to me back when I worked with Mikrotik gear was learning that the '?' character was an immediate "Show me all of the commands I can get to from the current prompt", and then appending '?' to existing commands would show all of the sub commands available etc.
From that point I found the CLI to be relatively discoverable as a way to configure the devices.
Makes sense. I guess the UI experience, including the terminal was so alien I assumed routerOS was an actual low level OS but, in retrospect, I was an idiot and of course it is Linux under the hood!
It's a hard problem because when you start asking questions about what an unqualified home user needs it's easy to say just one more thing.
port forwarding? ofcourse how else can the kid have a minecraft server with friends
dynamic dns? then the friends don't need to search "what's my ip" every time
parental controls? to schedule how much time they can play minecraft...
I like Mikrotik but for anyone trying to go beyond the barebones default firewall/router/ap on the quickset page you need to be prepared to learn. i.e. To make a DHCP reservation, you go through the menus until you click IP, then you realise you don't click on DHCP client to set up a DHCP client you go into DHCP server and try to give a device a reservation which requires the step of making it static first then seperately setting it's IP.
The complaint basically boils down to: they have all the options there and available and the least common task is just as easy to do as the 2nd most common (after initial basic setup), and if a task touches multiple parts of the config you need to touch each of those parts. Great for someone who knows what they're doing but for a home user it would be great to have more quickset pages for the 2nd to 10th most common tasks (as intagible as that list is).
The one time I tried to use the quickset page was to set up an AP and it did. I was rather surprised that it didn’t configure an IP address to access the admin page afterwards…
I love Mikrotik too and the price point, but it's for people who know network engineering or need a particularly rare type of gear (like a small inexpensive 10G SFP switch).
I tell people to jump into Ubiquiti's (ui.com) ecosystem which is much more accessible for power users who occasionally wrestle with concepts like wireless,
VLANs, subnets, and traffic rules.
Register readers with very long memories indeed will recall similar concerns being raised over Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX-81. The fear then was that the sneaky Sovs would try to buy heaps of ZX-81s for their Zilog Z80-A CPUs and might 1KB RAM to upgrade their nuclear missile guidance systems.
This sounds like a possible explanation for why I keep getting recommended different AWS client libraries from the boss to "solve instability" of a service that works 99.8% except for when the S3 endpoint (backblaze) has brief mystery issues.
May I humbly recommend Godot? It has webgl export as well as plenty of others and is fully open source, lots of language bindings as well if you don't want to learn gdscript (syntactically similar to python and honestly is pretty darned easy to work with) https://godotengine.org/
This reminds me of the time I was dealing with a REST API that exposed an image thumbnail.. except the response contained a file path, and the response completed before the file was actually written to disk.
They were paying me to work with this, yet they couldn't be bothered to fix this on their end.
