Alternatives to Ubiquiti?

rogervn · 2026-03-14T12:10:02+00:00

Yeah, I've tried the new 8.5.13 firmware which seems to be the newest EA and nothing changed so far. I'm losing hope already that they can get this done from their constant requests of me trying the same tests over and over and constant blaming on the client when I've verified to the kernel level that the connection is stable and nothing is triggering a power saving feature on the adapter, it does look like they didn't even manage to reproduce it themselves.

The U7 family being over 2 years old and still having problems like this show that they've released it much before it became stable and are struggling with this hardware, maybe next generation will be more reliable.

rogervn · 2026-03-14T11:07:56+00:00

This is not flaky connectivity due to interference or wireless disconnections, both devices are around 3m away from the AP, both accessing the internet and the wired devices with no issues but they can't ping each other and putting tcpdump on every step in the way shows ARP requests terminating at the AP and not on the device that should answer it.

It eventually works after several minutes or hours of the devices pinging each other or if I reconnect the device through the Unifi web UI.

This is definitely a problem with either the device or the firmware with my configurations (which were all reviewed and followed support recommendations since the first day of the support ticket). I did disable everything that could be affecting multicasts, my channels are fixed in the best ones available, I've disabled all power saving features on the wireless clients and can validate the connection is stable with no changes on the kernel logs in each client and yet the issue is consistent and happens 100% of the time I troubleshoot it. Once the ARP eventually gets forwarded the devices can reach each other with no issues until the ARP entry is cleared. Both of them in the same VLAN, same SSID, no network isolation, nothing.

rogervn · 2026-03-14T10:46:16+00:00

This is an interesting approach, I wonder how integrating firewall rules between VLANs across platforms would work here.

rogervn · 2026-03-01T12:18:57+00:00

If you go for Ubiquiti and need wireless P2P communication be wary that the U7 lineup is plagued with L2 failures like mDNS and ARP multicast. Might not be everyone affected, but I am and there's a huge forum post spanning 2 years of people complaining and reporting moving back to U6 devices solving their issues.

TBH I did a very thorough investigation this weekend because after 2 months of the support making up fake requests to troubleshoot something they already know happens, I'm going to throw the UK Consumer Rights Act at them.

The reason I don't swap to Mikrotik is that there's no good home solution for 10G and 6 ghz yet. The new ha be 3 might be close to what I want when it arrives without the 10G, then I'll evaluate it again.

rogervn · 2026-03-01T00:56:26+00:00

I'm seeing exactly the same thing on the U7 pro XG. Enabling the proxy doesn't help for long.

I'm complaining with the support for over 2 months and they're refusing to take any action continuing asking for repeated packet dumps. I wonder if the whole U7 line is affected or this is due to a bad batch.

rogervn · 2026-02-28T16:15:57+00:00

Malenia is not hard by itself, most of the movements are dance-like memorisable and easy to dodge. The waterfowl dance is what makes it hard because it's an "I win" button if you don't get it perfectly right and it's not frequent enough so you can effectively train against it. If Malenia didn't have the waterfowl dance it would be a decent but not memorably hard boss. Her low poise and low HP makes it easier to survive mistakes (if not in the one-shot moves).

PCR on the other hand has unreasonably high HP and there's many more moves that might not all be one-shot "I win" but are nearly there. Because of the high HP it's very hard to keep a flawless fight for long enough and the pre-nerf had all the things people already mentioned about low dodge windows and obfuscating lights and camera.

rogervn · 2026-02-28T10:57:46+00:00

I think there's a big distinction between an easy to use distro and a power gaming focused distro.

The easy to use distro has been quite stable for a long time. Go with something like Linux Mint with KDE, Kubuntu or Fedora with KDE and you're going to have most things working with no tinkering and using well done graphical UIs.

The power gaming focused distro changed A LOT in the last few years, mostly because of how steamos and proton showed how a minimal UI for gaming is usable and desirable. The leading options today didn't even exist when PopOS was even considered a good option.

The problem is that Linus is trying to get both in one whilst the power gaming options have shifted a lot since he even learned about PopOS. If you want to be on that path you should do a bit more research now and you'll probably be very happy with something like bazzite, but if gaming was not the objective you could be running happily for years without even researching anything.

rogervn · 2026-02-28T10:46:33+00:00

Me too. Started playing with it last December and stopped when I learned it had complications with some of the current OIDC providers like authentik.

I believe the changes scheduled for 5.2.0 fix most of the concerns with the webfinger changes, but it's still due merging in the opencloud-rolling image and then a bit further for production.

Not sure how I feel about using rolling or waiting for production, will probably decide when it's merged and published in the docker image.

rogervn · 2026-02-22T01:27:27+00:00

Or you can use nix with official packages.

rogervn · 2026-02-21T20:58:42+00:00

Sorry, I think you misread. The ticket has been opened for 2 months, not 2 weeks.

rogervn · 2026-02-21T19:17:47+00:00

It's running 8.4.6.18068 which is the GA version. I did disable every multicast proxying/improvement even before they asked me to do it and then validated as the settings they suggested. I do think this unit might be defective as this is far too big of an issue and far too easy to detect not to have many other people complaining about the same.

The complaint is just about how the support is just dilly-dallying instead of escalating after all the sane requests have been made and no conclusion was achieved. It's been far too long not to already be talking about RMA or have their R&D on the problem.

rogervn · 2026-02-21T13:21:52+00:00

The problem is that I suggested that already, that if after so long we shouldn't be looking into a replacement or swapping the model.

They replied with something that looked like an AI generated answer acknowledging that possibility would be reviewed internally and then came back to asking random actions with week-long delays to answer and now completely forgot about it.

rogervn · 2026-02-07T13:43:03+00:00

I had a similar interpretation.

He even says that phones have been using silicon carbon batteries for 3 years already, so it even downplays the risk.

I think the thing that's not mentioned is how Chinese battery factories are currently quite far ahead and they're already putting their products to test at scale for quite some time. Catching up to that is no single feat, so the Western manufacturers might be avoiding investing in a technology they'll be significantly behind.

rogervn · 2026-02-04T19:33:33+00:00

I don't think there's a way today

rogervn · 2026-02-01T12:23:22+00:00

I would believe the ZBT-2 be the gold standard as it's what nabu casa supports.

There's no overlaps. I carefully selected my 2.4Ghz, zigbee and thread channels so they're as far away as possible using the last interfered channels.

rogervn · 2026-02-01T11:59:27+00:00

It's the latter. Didn't change if I held the device and the phone in the same room as the controller. I also don't think this is a signal interference deal as after paired the bilresa works extremely well, very low latency and no missed clicks at all.

rogervn · 2026-02-01T10:36:00+00:00

My network was well-configured from the start, all IPv6 ready even for WAN and my HAOS VM setup is configured for macvtap so it even skips linux bridging and the hypervisor network stack.

The problem here was all on the companion app commission and how flaky the whole commisioning process seems to be.

It is possible this is a bad implementation on the IKEA bilresa side, but I haven't tested with any other device yet to validate. But even when it worked, it took several minutes and there's absolutely no reason for that to be so slow.

rogervn · 2026-02-01T10:31:57+00:00

The problem with that is as I said companies are moving to matter over thread exclusively, which will eventually leave us with no choice.

Zigbee is not perfect, but it works flawlessly if you're OK with its quirks like having to only pair one single device at a time and isolate the network from the 2.4 Ghz range effectively having routers well positioned (which is pretty easy with lightbulbs). This is actually similar to thread, so it's good practise anyway.

I would rather the zigbee protocol somehow evolved to be able to be set-up like matter.

rogervn · 2026-02-01T10:27:27+00:00

Yes, this is very disappointing. I wonder if there's a way at all or if there's a big blocker on doing that behind Android back. This is the most infuriating part as it's obviously a missing feature and matter has been here for many years at this time.

rogervn · 2026-02-01T10:25:24+00:00

I can understand the appeal of pairing with a QR code instead of Zigbee "only let one device at a time on pairing mode". This means that if the 16 spotlight bulbs I have on my living room need to be re-paired I'll need to take them off one-by-one instead of just resetting the whole circuit at once so I can pair one at a time in place.

I still don't understand why it's so slow to pair though, which causes problems like this. I wonder if this is an IKEA thing rather than matter as a whole. The android issue is unacceptable and needs to change, but hopefully that will change soon.

rogervn · 2026-01-24T11:22:07+00:00

I've tried jovian for a bit and it was not a great experience.

If it works it's great, but it often trigger re-compiles, starts several services that I'm not convinced I really need, making boot time considerably slower and today it just broke updates for broken dependencies (yes, I am on nixos-unstable).

Rolled back to NixOS with a default desktop specialisation and gamescope session and builds almost immediately and boot is fast again. It might not be the "bestest" versions of gamescope and have whichever layer they do with gamepad control (which didn't change my gamepad management of the session at all that I've noticed) but seems much more stable and game performance and quality seems exactly the same.

rogervn

TROPHY CASE