strongswan VS lightway-core

IPsec is commonly employed by enterprise-grade VPN solutions such as FortiGate for its excellent security and richness of features, though open-source implementations such as OpenIKED and strongSwan also exist. It uses Internet Key Exchange (IKE) under the hood which is further divided into IKEv1 and IKEv2, the latter a more modern and secure version of the former.

You do know that Linux has native GUI support for VPNs don't you? Install the strongSwan suite from your distribution. This will enable IPsec/IKEv2 on your machine.

ports: strongswan 5.9.10[13]

[9] https://github.com/strongswan/strongswan/releases/tag/5.9.9

So far it seems that strongswan is my best bet and wireguard with the WG-portal seems interesting. I was hoping someone could give me insight into either of these options, or any options in general.

Pretty much any IPSec client should work, doesn't have to be FortiClient. Quick Google search shows this as a possible option: https://www.strongswan.org/

The hotel's ISP is detecting OpenVPN traffic and blocking them. Switching to a non-standard port, or TCP/443 might work if their filter is laughably simple, but OpenVPN isn't really designed to avoid detection. If you can set up Outline in your server it might work, if not, just give up and stick with ExpressVPN, they use Lightway Core, a custom open source protocol with built-in obfuscation.