Once upon a time, John Harris johnmh@splentity.com said:
I cannot think of any reason not to use ones distro of choice as their gateway and/or VPN. I personally use a system Fedora (well, Fedora + Freed-ora- freedom) for my router and VPN. OpenWRT is not inherently better than Fedora, and there are many benefits of using Fedora over OpenWRT.
It's the difference between using a multitool and a purpose-built tool. Sure, your Leatherman or Gerber can strip wires and screw in a switch, but a good pair of wire strippers and assorted size screwdrivers will usually be more convenient (and quicker) to use.
OpenWrt is a light-weight system designed for router setups. It has an integrated web UI (for those that want it) that can configure and monitor traffic, and all configuration normally needed is in a small set of config files in one directory and in a common format (makes management much easier for occasional edits).
There are things that OpenWrt does easily that Fedora doesn't do at all; for example, the web UI on OpenWrt includes real-time traffic graphs. I don't know of anything that can provide that in Fedora.
Also, OpenWrt uses much less resources than any general-purpose OS install, so costs less.