Modern home networking.

Back in the day, of course, the cable that came out of our modem or cable modem or whatever went straight into a Linux box with various packet filtering stuff ( unless you were a rhesus monkey, and come to think of it, the original lioness was OpenBSD). These days, I suspect, no-one bothers, we just buy smarter ADSL modems in the first place. Is that the case, oh geeks? Has the wrt54g rendered the home gateway obsolete?