A lot of reasonably competent geeks just never get deep into networking, and VPNs can be overwhelming. It doesn't really help that for a long time it was all IPSec which basically you need to learn voodoo to manage. Thankfully we have much better tools now, but it's still just a tech layer that many people don't touch frequently.

I think the questions are more prominent because a wider audience of people are becoming more privacy conscious.

In my case, I haven’t had the advantage of going to school for any of this, so I have to pick up knowledge where I can. If there is a reliable tool available to accomplish my task, I’m more likely to use it than to pursue a more manual solution because even simple computing questions can be rabbit holes that result in hours of reading and learning.

The reason that I made this post is because your options are always limited by your awareness of available solutions, and I presumed there might be someone else out there who has struggled getting a VPN reliably bound to a service.

Yes, please. And thank you to everyone who does the heavy lifting for me.

it's not just one thing though. For a non technical user, it's nerve-wracking to worry that if you screw up the install, or download the wrong package, or configure the YAML wrong, or open the wrong port, or there's a port conflict, or you forgot to update the software... now you're potentially unprotected (even if that's not the case - many will still worry).

Not to mention even if you - as I did - had to skill up to understand it, three months passes and you're terrified to touch it because you've forgotten all the stuff you learned to set it up.

Same as how the majority of people don't even change their own oil on their cars - even though it's fairly easy.