I have a friend in Russia who loves watching animal videos and those silly video essays on YouTube and now YouTube is blocked in Russia. I have a spare netbook with Linux Mint and I've been trying to set up an OpenVPN server for her using this guide and I've tried a cracked version of OpenVPN Access Server, but I guess this whole thing is above my pay grade – the client on my phone still won't connect.
What the easiest solution to this situation? Should pull the trigger and install Debian because all those easy setup guides are targeted to Debian? Is there is easier alternative to OpenVPN with an android client?
You should look into tailscale (and if you want, headscale, which is a foss tailscale server implementation that tailscale clients including the android one work with out of the box). I haven't used tailscale for this explicit purpose so I don't know the exact steps but from the documentation I remember reading that setting up something like this is possible.
Tailscale is great. Don't know whether their centralized coordination service is blocked in Russia though.
That's where headscale comes in. They will have to use a VPS though.
I know it's disabled by the company in Cuba unfortunately 🥲