Ubiquiti UniFi access point

Your experience seems to indicate that even their APs are a mess; while I applaud your effort to solve this, "I'm too old for this shit" is where I'm at now when it come to my home network, I (and my wife and kids) just want it to work so I've spent a fair chunk of change on it. Uniquiti APs are fine, they've been reliable for me; I have one AP that's nearly a decade old and still going strong, and I just swap them out or extend coverage when a new generation comes along, and move the older ones to where stronger/newer wifi isn't needed. If I wasn't in the Unifi ecosystem which keeps my life simple, I'd probably look at Ruckus or maybe see whether Mikrotik have anything compelling yet. As it stands; the Unifi Server I'm self-hosting keeps them up-to-date and optimised, so I just plug in an AP, adopt it and forget about it, it gets configured automatically and away we go; that's about the amount of involvement I want these days. Coincidentally, I need an extra AP for my Steam Frame to use it away from the dongle in an area where I currently don't have good WiFi coverage, so I'm going to pick one (probably a 7-Pro or 7-Pro-XG) up and just plug it in to an ethernet port in the room in question, wait a couple of minutes and be ready to roll.

- Cat-5 in my apartment wall from my ISP. - ISP provided router that splits out IPTV into my TV box and has one port as passthrough to my pfsense box. It should be possible to do this splitting in pfsense but I never managed. - The pfsense box is a passive ITX machine with a Celeron N3350 and two intel NICs. - A dumb gigabit switch is connected to the LAN side of the pfsense box. - I run ethernet to my stationary machines. - A Ubiquiti access point feeds the wifi. This setup has worked pretty much flawlessly for two years. If I was goinig to do it again I would install OpenBSD instead of pfsense on the box. I didn't like the political drama around pfsense the last few years and I hardly use any of the features. I just want something that never breaks and has few foot-guns.

I've got some old Unifi gear and there's a couple of things that make them unlike Apple. Firstly, I can run the network controller easily in Linux (in Docker as it happens, but the image is third party - jacobalberty/unifi). It's happily running on Raspberry Pi. Secondly, I've got one really old access point that is now unsupported for updates, but apart from that, there's no problem with controlling it along with the supported ones. Also, I don't need a cloud connection though they do encourage using one.

Same for me, buying my dream machine pro (and AP's) was one of my few tech purchases that I have zero regrets buying. It is still running strong after a few years and see no reason to change it anytime soon. Have they been perfect? No, but this has allowed me to control my network how I actually want to control it. This has lead me to now having multiple Ubiquiti components (with more planned), my most recent was switching away from Synology to the UNAS Pro and it has been great. Really the only thing I ever bought from them that I really regretted was the tooless mini rack. Was really cool but I have non ubiquiti things that I need to mount and I doubt they are going to actually make a server I can run k8s anytime soon.

I use a combination of pfSense on a Dell mini and a Unifi access point by Ubiquiti. This set up splits the work so that wifi just does wireless stuff and the router just does routing and firewall. Works very well and is very stable.