An honest question from a 10-year USG user about where the FLEX H line is going...

Zyxel_USG_User · August 5

Hi all, thank you for the replies.

A few points from my side.

Of course a forum skews towards problems. People post when something hurts and stay quiet when things simply work. That is universal, not specific to Zyxel - I spend my own share of time troubleshooting kit from a certain fruit-branded vendor, with close to zero feedback from the manufacturer when a patch breaks something.

So to be clear about where my post came from: it was not based on the forum. It was based on the release notes.

I have been reading the uOS firewall release notes for quite a while now - not the threads here, the vendor's own change log. The question that gradually formed was never "are people complaining". It was: do I want to buy a platform whose published fix list still reads like "fixed basic functionality"?

I'd say: just look for the evidence yourselves in the release notes published here. A few examples: v1.21 (July 2024) fixed "the device becomes unresponsive and stop(s) processing traffic". v1.30 Patch 1 (November 2024) fixed upgrades that rolled back or reset the configuration to factory default after a reboot. v1.37 (January 2026) fixed a DoS prevention rule scoped to the WAN interface that was also filtering traffic from the IPsec tunnel. These are Zyxel's own words, with ticket numbers, in the official release notes.

That seems a fair question to ask before spending money, and it is answered from Zyxel's own documentation rather than from anyone's bad day.

I would still rather be corrected than proven right.

Maverick87 · August 6

So, your point is:

based on the release notes of the firmware, there are some fix about bug on "basis" functionalities.

It's like saying: we've solved a problem with packet transmission between two ports. It's such a basic feature that theoretically everything should have been working perfectly for years.

Is the way I interpreted it correct? If you consider that nothing is perfect, and that what seems to have been consolidated for years is, in some way, never consolidated. I've worked both as a programmer and as a bug tester, and I can tell you that it's difficult to keep up with new releases while also keeping the previous part intact; some bug always slips out or is always introduced. But this applies to everyone, one above all being the recalls for malfunctions in cars, one among many relating to airbags that deployed late or even if you hit a pothole. In every sector, there's always some bug or some unexpected situation, even in things that have worked for years.
But this doesn't mean you shouldn't buy a car anymore; hopefully, any manufacturer knows how to put together a steering wheel, four wheels, and an engine, but sometimes even engines seize up and break, even in the most expensive cars.

mMontana · August 6

I hope that @Maverick87 will consider interesting what I'm about to write.

At uOS devices I started to read a lot of forum posts about features, stability, performances. And what flabbergasted me was that a "brand new generation" of products was, for several features, lacking compared to stale old (philosophically) firmware 4.x or 5.x versions. Don't get me wrong, probably for some more value added options (read: pay) is a nice step forward but currently these are not seen as interesting for my customers. More on that: at the beginning "nebula" for appliances was a "cloud only" scenario, which did not work in any way to me (if the connection to internet is severed in my opinion is important that i can connect to the device with a local user).

Few old 4.x devices were replaced, and at that time my standard pitch was "Migrate to 5.x is faster, easier, with less risks. Probably we'' need to replace sooner the hardware, but currently there's no gain in go for uOS".

For starting a new branch (which is rolling in these days) at march i looked for the price status and the OS status for uOS. At that time, there were so little price difference between uOS and ZLD. Also, ZLD already had expire date on it and it was 2030.

Therefore I suggested my customer to consider the higher price for more time getting in touch with the newer generation and discover if Zyxel was a interesting canditate, or of the branch was worth the time for being used as evaluation for other products.

I toyed a little with uOS 1.38 and I found it "enough" for the needs. On one hand is a bit more clicky in a lot of steps, and the menu structure could be vastly reworked for being perceived as real improvement. I found also some quirks in the environment I'm managing, but currently and for "simple" things the device shows to be not so bad. However… while the philosophy is the same that Zyxel had, with some improvements in the user interface (1 page for the VPN, not splitting anymore between gateway and connection), IDK if a really skilled CLI grinder will evaluate "as good as" ZLD 5.

Maverick87 · August 6

My first Zyxel device was the Flex 50H as entry level, I've never had the pleasure of playing with older ZLD devices, so I have no knowledge of older firmware or devices; furthermore, I only use the firewall for very basic things (Policy rules, Tailscale VPN, etc.).

In my opinion, there are several things that can definitely be improved, and I'm not afraid to point out that with every fix released, something breaks (I just filed a bug report because with the latest firmware, some SNMP OIDs that I used, now no longer work).

But again, this is perfectly normal, and I understand it.
In fact, I really appreciate that the Zyxel technical team is always on the ball and is here to help with even the smallest issues; and that's not something you can take for granted.

An honest question from a 10-year USG user about where the FLEX H line is going...

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