I dont know much about your router/ap, but from some light googling the virgin media hub 5 has 2.5gb/s ethernet and wifi 6 which should be fairly decent. I agree with what most comments are saying about connecting the pi using ethernet (“hardwiring” it) and setting a static ip. The raspberry pi image flasher even has an option for that in the advanced settings if I’m not mistaken. If youre worried about not being able to plug a keyboard/mouse and monitor to the pi look at ssh. If you arnt comfortable with command line/terminal I cant say I’d recommend setting up your own router/firewall.

If you dont have any ethernet ports available on your router then looking at a good switch for 2.5 gbps might be a better bet, I always perfer physical connections to wifi.

If you do want to jump down the rabbit hole of pfsense/opnsense/openwrt then hit ebay and look for a cheap workstation and an intel nic, that will get you started messing about with it. Be sure to do research about power consumption of the device youre getting, the raspberry pis sip power but beefier machines will suck some power and might show up on your electricity bill.

I use opnsense, the forums are a good place to look at hardware that you might want to gravitate towards, intel nics have been my best bet but there are plenty of resources to tell you what is compatible and what isnt with openbsd.

Are you tellin me a shrimp stuffed this ribeye?

I can recommend the dietpi OS; it is a minimal os that comes with a package manager for installing containers for things like radarr, sonarr, deluge, and jellyfin, which will allow you to download/watch movies(find on radarr, download with deluge, watch on jellyfin) and tv shows (find on sonarr, download with deluge, watch on jelyfin) in a fairly autonomous way. Its a bit of setup if you havent done it before it might not be for you but once its running its fairly seamless.

Interesting read, thanks for posting. I hadn’t considered how predictive text works in a terminal emulator and its cool to see how that works as well as getting a better understanding of child processes and what commands would/wouldn’t start one