My Vivaldi nightmare is over. I think. I've thought the same thing in the past, but the painfully slow loading times have returned. There's a somewhat widespread problem where Chromium-based browsers some pages load slowly, sometimes after displaying an error, and nothing worked for me. The last thing I did was start it in Wayland., and neither. The solution seems to have come by chance.
I have a Movistar router very far away, and a D-Link router is close to where I usually stay. If I remember correctly, the latest version of its firmware was from 2015, and WiFi security did not go beyond WPAWhat made me decide to change the firmware on the D-Link was the Steam Deck, which in its version 3.7.8 has messed up some connections. I looked to see if there was any more up-to-date alternative firmware and there are at least two, but I decided on DD-WRT.
DD-WRT and WPA2, the solution to my slow Chromium
By the way, my phone was flagging that D-Link's WiFi as dangerous. Since I have an old Apple AirPort—which didn't work at all—I thought, "I try this one and, in case it breaks, I have the other one.«So I looked at the documentation and consulted it with DeepSeek. I installed DD-WRT, I set it up in bridge mode and made the basic settings to make the router work with other software.
After finishing, I tried connecting my Steam Deck to its Wi-Fi, and the problems were resolved. As if that weren't enough, DeepSeek also reminded me of something: it was better to put it in bridge mode so the main router would manage the connections. So I did. With that change, AdGuard Home also works on any device without having to add its DNS in the Wi-Fi settings.
Unexpected side effect
What I didn't expect was that this small change would improve my experience with Vivaldi and Chromium in general. Now, loading times seem normal, and when a page takes longer than expected, I check Firefox and it's the same. So, I assume it's a problem with the network or the page in question, but not with the Chromium engine on Linux + Wayland or whatever.
I killed two birds with one stone, although I wish neither Google nor Valve had broken anything. It's one of the problems we Linux users face: despite what they say, they care less about us. And look, Valve's system is Linux...