Installing unbound from the command line is no different than ntpMerlin - you can do this! and the current v3.22 is probably the best one yet, in my experience on the same router as you.
if you're concerned about your ISP tracking/logging your DNS traffic, this is one way to minimize that - it only happens when unbound has to go to the Auth servers. Combined with SkyNet and diversion (blocking malicious stuff from coming in), it's a significant privacy enhancement because the amount of personal data leaking from your network slows to a virtual trickle.
Basically, your router becomes a caching DNS - if you point your devices to it, you bypass google/cloudflare/quad9 (big data).
It's fast...very fast: once you have built a "phonebook" of IP addresses to route to, a browser only has to look as far as your router for the IP. When a device goes looking for an IP address nobody on the network has visited yet In that case, it references the SAME authoritative DNS servers that big data does, without passing through their data mining mechanisms.
View attachment 30342
that's my chart right now (with 2-3 days of uptime, since upgrading to Merlin v386 ), and you'll see that the biggest spike on the chart is the 0-1 usec (under one millionth of a second - that's about 1/3rd of the drift of my ntpMerlin). the next highest one is 32-65 msec, but there are more results below that than above it (time-wise)...so DNS RTT times (on my network; yours will likely be similar or possibly better) are <65ms
in most cases...and lower the more you use it.
