their NICs will not work with regular kernel drivers. you will lose the only edge their hardware have which is dealing with a stupid large number of clients.

everything else (speed, uptime, ram/cpu power, beanforming magic, etc) you are better off with linksys devices when using open source drivers.

>speed, uptime, ram/cpu power, beanforming magic

I literally have none of these problems and I run ubiquiti everywhere

I also have a small compact car and it is fine for me to drive it every day to work, market, etc. Doesn't mean an expensive sports car is not much, much faster.

The irony is that here the compact car is more expensive :D maybe the correct analogy is a minivan, since it can hold more clients. but still, more expensive than the TP-Link sports car.

Oh, that would be handy. I have a couple, and they work just fine as regular APs. However, the odd time I do need to make changes, it's going through the whole bloated UI and management app (with MongoDB etc. installed). Really, I'd be quite happy to just run independent OpenWRT on them, since I don't need to integrate with larger infrastructure.