Self-hosting my photos with Immich

OpenVPN is far from "no fuss", especially when compared to Tailscale.

I like to self host things so I also self host Headscale (private tailnet) and private derp proxy nodes (it is like TURN). Since derp uses https and can run on 443 using SNI I get access to my network also at hotels and other shady places where most of the UDP and TCP traffic is blocked.

Tailscale ACL is also great and requires more work to achieve the same result using OpenVPN.

And Tailscale creates a wireguard mesh which is great since not everything goes through the central server.

You should give it a try.

Why not just use wireguard directly? The configuration is fairly trivial

With Tailscale you don't have to learn anything, you just install apps and click.

One value of Tailscale for a ton of simple use-cases is that people don't have time / don't want to learn.

Wireguard is great, I have personally donated to it and have used Wireguard for years before it became stable. And I still use it on devices (routers) where Tailscale is not supported. But as Jason stated - it is quite basic and is supposed to be used in other tools and this is what we are seeing with solutions like Tailscale.

Tailscale makes it simple for the user - no need to set up and maintain complex configurations, just install it, sign in with your SSO and it does everything for you. Amazing!

Even more trivial with Tailscale, so why wouldn’t I use Tailscale to configure wireguard for me?

I'm a bit skeptical that I don't have full control of my keys, but it does seem convenient.

You can have full control over your keys if you want: https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock

That's pretty cool, thanks for the info! I've been looking into Tailscale the past few days since it actually seems pretty convenient.

I've seen they offer to use Mullvad as an exit node for devices which is very cool. Sadly it seems like for this to work, you have to have them manage your Mullvad keys, which to me kind of defeats the purpose of Mullvad in some ways. But I can see how it makes sense to them from a business-perspective.