I’m currently running pfsense, and then mikrotik and ubiquiti switched and ubiquiti AP’s. I’m slowly removing the ubiquiti switches and moving to mikrotik as I’m upgrading to 10gbe. Mikrotik switches have a reputation of being reliable, capable, and cheap-ish. So far I like them. While I love ubiquiti’s single pane of glass approach with the unifi controller, I wanted to get away from that a bit. I work in IT, and most things I encounter don’t have that… And are configured via cli and or web interface. When I built my home network I jumped into ubiquiti for the ease. Now I’m back tracking for more learning.

I might cop some flack but I use Cisco, they’re rock solid, last for years and just work with minimal issues and I’ve not run into problems with hardware under performing or firmware bugs like I have on others.

That said, Ubiquiti makes fantastic hardware, I believe Mikrotik does too.

You can absolutely buy open hardware that allows you to install custom switching OS; Dell and Mellanox make them as do many other manufacturers (I think even Facebook has a hardware switch, not that I’d buy it lol). One of the more common OS to install on them is Cumulus Linux and a lot of these use “spine leaf” topologies.