[code_biologist]

I needed access to my home NAS and linux GPU box while visiting family last year over the holidays. I was in a rush. I spent 45 minutes trying to get Wireguard configured and working, then tried Tailscale and had the network I was looking for in 15 minutes. I'm not a homelabber. I hate network admin.

Is Just Works™ / being moron-resistant, with good first-party client apps, a bad reason to pick Tailscale?

[stego-tech]

Of course not - if it works, it works, and I won’t fault folks for using Tailscale (heck, I like Tailscale, but I just got Wireguard working suitably for my needs first). My gripe was more that folks use it for a virtual network on their home LAN without seemingly grasping the implications of such abstraction - kind of like how the trend during the pandemic was “everything in Kubernetes” even though VMs might have been a better fit for their given problem.

If you’re willing to put in the effort to make it work, then go for it, but I just caution folks to understand there might be better solutions to consider - and that especially when talking about abstraction layers, you absolutely need to understand the implications of said layers before deployment.