This is almost true, but not quite. WireGuard is a protocol, but it's also the Linux kernel implementation of that protocol; there are design decisions in the protocol that specifically support software security goals of the kernel implementation. For instance, it's designed to be possible to implement WireGuard without demand dynamic allocation.

The post mentions the deficiencies of TCP for mobile devices over unreliable links, but I've had nothing but trouble with Wireguard when connecting from phones via mobile data.

I suspect it's due to my mobile operator doing traffic shaping / QoS that deprioritizes UDP VPN.

In contrast, connecting to OpenVPN over TCP was a huge improvement. Not at all what I expected.

Hard to read due to LLM generated prose.

Does it bother anyone else when an article is so clearly written by an LLM? Other than being 3x longer than it needs to be the content is fine as far as I can tell, but I find the voice it’s written in extremely irritating.

I think it’s specifically the resemblance to the clickbaity writing style that Twitter threads and LinkedIn and Facebook influencer posts are written in, presumably optimized for engagement/social media virality. I’m not totally sure what I want instead, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same tactics used in writing I admired, but probably much more sparingly?

What is it that makes tptacek’s writing or Cloudflare’s blog etc so much more readable by comparison? Is it just variety? Maybe these tactics should be reserved for intro paragraphs (of the article but also of individual sections/chapters might be fine too) to motivate you to read on, whereas the meat of the article (or section) should have more substance and less clickbaiting hooks?

For a moment I thought that Tunnelblick had added WireGuard support. But no, it's probably just an AI hallucination.

This is a clever reuse of WireGuard's cryptographic design, and may indeed make sense as a way to slap some low-overhead encryption on top of your app's existing UDP packets.

However, it's definitely not a replacement for TCP in the way the article implies. WireGuard-the-VPN works because the TCP inside of it handles retransmission and flow control. Going raw WireGuard means that's now entirely up to you.

So this might be a good choice if you're doing something realtime where a small number of dropped packets don't particularly matter (such as the sensor updates the article illustrates).

But if you still need all your packets in order, this is probably a bad idea. Instead, I'd consider using QUIC (HTTP/3's UDP protocol), which brings many of the benefits here (including migration of connections across source IP address and no head-of-line-blocking between streams multiplexed inside the connection) without sacrificing TCP's reliability guarantees. And as the protocol powering 75% of web browsing¹, is a pretty safe choice of transport.

¹ https://blog.apnic.net/2025/06/17/a-quic-progress-report/