edit: used to be a maintainer for a short while :)
* You can SSH in and configure it like you would a managed switch or router. There's a single object that models all of the device's configuration, when you commit it a bunch of scripts activate and actaully apply the configuration to the running system.
* Deployments are image based, you can roll back to older images etc.
* You don't need to look at any of the system's underlying configuration files or use any of the normal Linux commands to examine and manipulate the state of the system (the commands are still there for convenience of course). You don't even need to be aware that you're really using a bunch of custom bash functions to examine and manipulate the state of the system.
I personally use regular Debian 12 on my router without problems. It also has "declarative config" since all the configuration, firewall rules, etc are a bunch of config files that I can scp / ansible over any time.
https://vyos.io/
The VyOS website says:
> Democratizing how we access networks through a universal Router and Open source software.
> Our vision at VyOS is to dramatically change how we access networks so that we can all build the solutions we always dreamed of, without restrictions, limitations, or prohibitive costs.
But I'm still kind of none the wiser. Does this thing use Linux or something else?