Opnsense. Switched to it right after the whole pfSense plus fiasco.

I went from a 4670k -> 8500-> 5900X -> 5800X3D. Zen 3 has treated me pretty well aside from some bad RAM. However, if I was building now, I’d probably go Intel. 13700k is cheaper than the 7800X3D in most places. It gets close enough gaming performance while absolutely smoking it in productivity. Not to mention idle wattage is better on Intel, which is great for me since I spend more time working with my system.

Intel is my definitive choice for home servers thanks to quicksync, lower idle wattage, and higher core counts.

Why passthrough for opnsense? Shouldn’t bridges should be good enough?

A Pfsense/opnsense VM taught me how networking works. Before I set it up, all I knew about was port forwarding. I learned about firewall rules, LAN and WAN, VLANs, VPNs, DNS, Dynamic DNS, reverse proxies, bufferbloat, DHCP, etc.

I’m also learning how to make my own CI/CD pipelines with self hosted GitHub Actions as well as dockerizing applications.