It is still very much work in progress, so please do open me issues with bugs or future requests. If there will be enough interest, I'll definitely continue developing it. I still have enough cleanups I need to perform code wise.
Basically NetworkManager-ssh integrates OpenSSH tunnel capabilities with NetworkManager and provides you with the easiest of all VPNs, as OpenSSH lives on almost any *nix machine today.
That will set you up with NetworkManager and the traditional GNOME interface. I am the current maintainer of the package for Fedora.
In case you want to build the package for Debian/Ubuntu, you can use the complimentary packaging this repository provides, but please do not open bugs about it on this GitHub issue tracker. The correct thing to do is to use the upstream packages provided with the distribution and open bugs on the distribution issue tracker.
When things go wrong and you can't really figure out what's happening, have a look at /var/log/messages as you spin up the connection. You should be able to tell what is going wrong.