As I mentioned in my other blog, Hyper-Fast Home Server: My Network Upgrade Journey, about two years ago, I started using OPNsense as my primary router for my home network. That experience probably deserves another blog post explaining the challenges and fun issues I had to overcome to get it going.

Anyway, after all that, I came to love OPNsense as it offers all the features I need and more. It's also easy to customize and extend if needed. I have to say that OPNsense should be marketed as 'Router Software' or something similar because it's very feature-rich and can easily replace hardware-based routers like Netgear, Asus, or Cisco. I have always loved to tinker with routing and networking, ever since my AdvancedTomato project, which was a pretty big hit in the open-source router firmware community, even though it was just a fork of Tomato by Shibby.

AdvancedTomato started because I loved the Tomato firmware, but its UI design was very outdated. Even though I tried to get the community to improve or redesign the project, people insisted that the UI doesn't matter and that my ideas would make the Tomato UI ugly and unusable. Ironically, the project was very popular, with over 469,000 unique downloads to date. A lot of work was put into the project, and even today, it is still in use by almost 2,000 routers. I had a similar experience with OPNsense, with one big difference: the extensibility of theming. Tomato supported themes but only CSS-based ones, while OPNsense is a lot easier to customise.

So, here we are today, in May 2025. I've ported the AdvancedTomato theme to OPNsense, initially calling it AdvancedOPN, though it was shortly after renamed to 'Advanced' at the suggestion of Franco Fichtner, who has graciously helped me with the compilation and packaging of my new project. I haven't changed the theme much from AdvancedTomato because I wanted to keep it similar, but I think it turned out great. I use it daily, and it's now available as a package in the OPNsense Package & Updates manager. I don't have any statistics, but based on my testing and checks, I believe it's the best-looking theme for OPNsense. Obviously, that's my personal subjective belief.

Since the Advanced theme adds a little padding, there were some visual challenges with tables, but they were resolved successfully. What's also great is that the theme is optimized for large displays, such as 2560x1440px, making it a great choice for those who want to use the entire display to show as much data on a single page as possible. You can find the theme under "Packages" with name "os-theme-advanced"