OpenVPN

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 9 years (2016–2024), in 8 threads.

People raised many different problems with OpenVPN, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 9 complaints

DNS isn't updated automatically; user must configure arcane scripts they don't understand2024-10-16
OpenVPN clients are bad, and onboarding users generates many questions and support issues2022-06-22
Users must type password and TOTP code combined, or wait blindly for a phone push while VPN blocks2022-03-17
Configuration parameters were unclear and some documentation was out of date2022-01-13
Official and open source OpenVPN clients are buggy with crappy UI2020-04-08
Hard to configure, with hundreds of options and raw openssl error messages2018-08-04
Config files are so obfuscated that finding errors is difficult2018-08-01
Hard to configure, and easy to misconfigure so the server stays exposed2018-05-08
Public-key configuration is a disaster to set up, even with helper scripts2016-12-25