Reply to post: I'll take some, thank you.

I'll take some, thank you.

I work in education, our needs are not extravagant. What I need are basic mid market switches that boot up reasonably quickly, push packets, and I can patch and update without a ton of fuss. During Covid times, we have found new and exiting ways to stretch our budgets, time and resources, so something that also supported long EOL windows and reasonable support costs would also be ideal. A functional GUI would be nice.

Instead we have Cisco crap everywhere. It's all stuck in the late 90's. Our core stack takes upwards of half an hour to restart, and doesn't even have a power switch. An yes, due to the buggy crap that Switchzilla passes off as firmware, we have had to literally pull all the power cords out of the interlinked and dual redundant power supplies because the OS locked up and had to be hard dumped. We then had to roll back firmware and reboot it again in the middle of the day. That punched about a 2.5 hour window out in the middle of a workday. Management was not pleased. We also found out the Call Manager flipped out and crashed because it wasn't able to reach the network. They also want almost the cost of the hardware in support fees every year. Management isn't fond of that either. But for all that budget it hogs up, I am still stuck with crap documentation, a crippled GUI(even years on after the Meraki acquisition), and having to jump on a command line and fight a system that still REALLY wants to operate on TFTP in 2022.

I was hoping Ubiquity would get there act together, but they fell apart just as they were standing on the threshold. Their hardware was decent enough but the software and cloud crap was toxic. Seems like most of the other big players have similar problems, that you either get a Cloud only solution that costs a fourtune every year and paralyses your whole organization if their bach end

So yeah, I'd love to be able to run a stable open source OS like a BSD or Linux on my switches.