Consider Including OpenVPN Support in Default Linux Mint Installation

[paulo87]

Hello,

I would like to suggest including OpenVPN support (network-manager-openvpn and network-manager-openvpn-gnome) by default in Linux Mint.

Context:

Currently, Linux Mint does not come with these packages preinstalled, which prevents users from importing .ovpn configuration files in the Network Manager. When attempting to import a VPN file, an error appears stating that the file cannot be read or does not contain recognizable VPN connection information.

This issue is resolved by installing the missing packages manually:

sudo apt install network-manager-openvpn network-manager-openvpn-gnome

After installing these and restarting the system, the import function works correctly.

Why This Matters:

VPNs are widely used in corporate and governmental environments.
Many users expect OpenVPN support out of the box.
Other Linux distributions include these packages by default.

Would it be possible to consider adding these packages in future Linux Mint releases?

Thanks for your time and for the excellent work on Linux Mint!

Best regards,

Paulo Alexandre

[Fantu]

Yes vpn are largely used, many years ago I also used openvpn on many customers at work, recently removed almost all openvpn servers and replaced them with wireguard but openvpn still seems used enough to add it as default.
I also see some metapackages in Debian and Ubuntu have it, maybe I'll add network-manager-openvpn-gnome to the cinnamon-desktop-environment recommends in Debian.

While I can't say if it will also be done in Mint metapackages.