There are many MediaTek devices including UniFi 6 APs, but also in robimarko's dev branch, Qualcomm IPQ807x support is working very well. Modulo some kind of slow memory leak that seems to happen when an AP doesn't have clients :D but the "hard parts" are working. Speed is high on all radios, sysupgrade is working, thermal/clock management is working, there's even hardware offloads for NAT and other stuff I don't care about (I only use these devices as APs).
Why not go for a separate router and access point? I know its not for everyone, but it makes debugging stuff and tinkering so much easier. As a bonus, you can run a different router OS (like OPNSense).
I personally run a Mini-ITX PC ( ~200€ from used parts, but with 2.5G link) and an Ubiquiti AP WiFi 6 lite flashed with OpenWRT - it's around 100€ new, has great hardware and is supported.
that's a pretty decent access point! it uses the one 802.11ax chipset which does have linux support, on mediatek chips. performance of mediatek cpus & mediatek wifi do not impress me but it is great that linksys, belkin, ubiquity all have some near $130 moderm wifi gear out that does, all in a, pretty well. hoping the rest of the world can compete! strong value. especially if we do decouple the router & ap (something i did until very recently), then some pretty good wifi counts for a lot!
I used to do something like this, but I found it to be (moderately) annoying to manage and keep updated. And I find it hard to justify running a PC 24/7 that draws many tens (or even more than 100?) of watts vs. purpose-built networking gear that draws much much less. Sure, I could build something with an eye toward low power consumption, but I still doubt I'd be able to do as well as most off-the-shelf networking gear.
> But again it comes back to hardware. And wow what a tragedy we have been undergoing.
Agree that the 11ax situation is terrible, but consider pretty much all WiFi support is terrible on Linux for a while after new hardware supporting new standards comes out. I'm hoping that this situation will just get better with time, though I do worry that manufacturers are locking these things down more and more and are becoming even more unfriendly toward open source than they have been previously... which has always been not great.
i do think perhaps im being a little glum about the wifi situation, even though we havent seen new/better hardware supported on openwrt for near half a decade. not just a "new standards" lag. on the hopeful side, codesourcery & others are doing a much much better job helping to make official open source image building a stable replicable manageable process. yes, almost always on linux 4.14 and or gcc-4 or ehstever and this infuriates me a bit, feels like a waste. but there is also more mainlinelining going on, both with cpus and with wifi cards. in fact it's almost just too well supported, that the problem is, now, that there's still not available hardware that has the new chips. for whatever reason the draft spec hardware all seemed to have bad errata, low/no drivers. and we just havent seen modern platforms with both the newer cpus and the newer wifi. still just not much hardware in general, even though draft spec equipment has been around for i believe years. progress isnt totally like i want but definitely some good signs too, and some just regular old "it takes a long long time before most chips start making their way jnto products". kudos to the hardwork of many who have been mainlining your drivers. you are doong the right thing. the future is exciting.
I haven't been watching the Linux+wifi space all that much lately, but what you outline still does sound much better than the situation even a decade ago. I get that it's slow, and I totally sympathize with and share your frustration there. I'm running 11ac gear at home, but I'll be due for a new laptop before too long, and would like to start the 11ax upgrade process. Seeing that I might have to forego OpenWRT (or just wait an uncertain amount of extra time) isn't really fun.
I've thought about trying to do everything in the NUC, but at some point, just configuring it all is sorta a pain.
So OpenWRT is pretty amazing. Incredibly hard work, incredibly good system, targeting so many different devices. The "uci" configuration system and "ubus" rpc layer are nearly unparalleled in software, have brought so many different systems under a consistent yoke & collar. OpenWRT is incredible.
But again it comes back to hardware. And wow what a tragedy we have been undergoing. It's a barren bereft world. There's really only one router, with a pretty mediocre MediaTek cpu/wireless chipset, that has 802.11ax support at all. Hopefully things swing around some & we figure out how to get operating systems installing atop more contemporary routers, but there have been so so so few advances, hardware has gotten so much more inaccessible. It makes me all the sadder that decent wifi addon cards are blanketly unavailable. Read it and weep, the forum thread on 802.11ax routers: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/802-11ax-routers/10484/354
I got a second openwrt router recently. It's been very interesting & surprising seeing how little cross-access point and cross-band steering clients do. I'm literally compiling openwrt fresh today, as I work on this problem, with some fresh new software systems that have only just cropped up in OpenWRT land. For a while OpenWRT had nothing, but we're finally developing some acumen for using multiple access points and that's so necessary & so great. I've grown more respect for the mesh based products that have taken over: not only do the routers have to mesh (and route across the mesh), but it's really up to them to steer clients ("stations") to the best access point: the problem is bedevilling crazy hard.