[adornedCupcake]

All these seem nice but I never seem to find one that will interface with rootless nodes, amd link back to wherever my laptop is. There's always a requirement for a kernel module or mounting a new interface. For now I use chisel, but it's a hack and I need to manage addresses and ports manually.

[syoc]

A userspace implementation would use a lot of battery power on laptops and be less performant. Wireguard is now in the Linux kernel and does not require kernel modules. You will however require root privileges. I don't want an unprivileged user to be able to route all my traffic though some tunnel. Changing system wide routes should require root.

[jeroenhd]

Isn't the tool linked at the bottom, Nebula [1], capable of running without root?

Personally, I'm not surprised in the slightest that messing with networking requires administrative privileges. I don't really understand the use case for rootless nodes or how they're normally managed, but I can see how those are too niche for most networking software to work with.

I've never tried it, but perhaps you van get Innernet to work with the usermode WireGuard client (the one written in Go [2]), that seems to work on Android without any kernel support or root privileges. Innernet is a daemon over the wg command line tool so it might work out of the box?

[1]: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula [2]: https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-go/about/