headscale-ui VS outline-apps

However, I'm encountering significant challenges when it comes to setting up a seemingly simple static website for the UI.

I've been running wireguard on my own for a few years. I like it, but wish there was a better GUI.

I tried installing headscale. I didn't feel like I got the immediate rush of "cool, I have the baseline thing working" without reading the docs. And, I needed to use this for a GUI: https://github.com/gurucomputing/headscale-ui. I love the command line and am happy to use that, but I'm unsure if there is a benefit to headscale over wireguard if I'm doing that.

I just read this article on tailscale vs. openziti and it mentioned netmaker (a YC company). I tried installing it, but out of the box, "DNS" did not seem to work correctly.

Is anyone here a power user that also benefits from a full fledged GUI? Is tailscale the only option there? I prefer to self-host whenever I can, despite loving tailscale and the people behind it.

There's also gurucomputing/headscale-ui which I've used personally. It's been adequate, though the lack of native arm64 builds until recently has put me off a bit.

How does this compare to headscale-ui?

Headscale's ui is fine (well ish, I'd like headscale to write an API for ACLs). I might be biased though because I wrote it.

Have you tried https://github.com/gurucomputing/headscale-ui ?

My Dev container is here: https://github.com/gurucomputing/headscale-ui/blob/master/documentation/development.md

I threw my hat into the headscale crowd instead (to the point of writing a UI for it) but I'll have to give netmaker another spin soon.

Outline, a free and open-source VPN service developed by Google, is renowned for its user-friendly design. It can be conveniently established on diverse platforms, and this blog will specifically guide you through the process of setting up a self-hosted Outline VPN using Amazon LightSail.

Another good way is to set up your own VPN server on Digitalocean or something. Use a VPN protocol that is good at escaping detection. I recommend Outline VPN (getoutline.org). It's an open-source project that uses the Shadowsocks protocol and aims to provide censorship-free Internet to journalists in certain countries. It's not a VPN service so you need to set it up on your own server.

Use a self-hosted Outline on GCP or any other cloud platform, it works really well in my experience for circumventing these blocks.

Yes. Use an outline service. https://getoutline.org/

See https://github.com/Jigsaw-Code/outline-client/issues/1177, technically you don't need Outline Client, compatible Shadowsocks client like https://github.com/shadowsocks/ShadowsocksX-NG/releases should work too.