First off, sorry if this has been asked a million times in this community already, but the only post I found on this topic when I searched was over two years old.
I’ve been using PIA vpn for the past two years, but my subscription is ending soon and I was thinking about switching providers. I’m a fairly basic vpn user so I’m not overly concerned about advanced features and bells and whistles. I have a limited budget to work with, and I run Fedora os. Does anyone have any recommendations on what vpn I should be using?
I’ve seen Mullvad mentioned frequently, but it’s a touch expensive compared to others. I’ve heard some good things about Proton vpn too, but I know there was a controversy with their CEO not long ago. I’ve also just read something about IVPN and they look good, but I’d like opinions from more sources. I’m open too all other suggestions as well. Thanks for any and all thoughts!
Mullvad. I don’t even think about alternatives.
How important is port forwarding? I’ve never really bothered with it. I’m definitely still in the shallow end of the pool when it comes to using vpns.
The only realistic answer is “it depends”. Torrents require at least one side to have an open port. If your port isn’t open, you’ll only be able to connect to people who have opened theirs. If everyone had open ports, you wouldn’t need to worry about it. But the reality is that many people don’t bother with opening a port, so your connections will be limited.
The issue will be much more apparent on smaller/less popular torrents. With popular torrents and hundreds of seeders, chances are good that some people will have an open port. But your speeds may be limited, because you can only connect to a select few. Even worse, torrents may stall entirely if there are only a few seeders, (and none of them have open ports). It’s super frustrating looking at a torrent with 3 or 4 seeders, but seeing that it has stalled.
There are workarounds like pinholing, but those are bodges that require specific circumstances to work.
Seeding torrents will be next to impossible without it, especially for private trackers. It’s pretty vital for torrenting. Anything else, doesn’t matter.
I used Mullvad for a year and love the service, but they explicitly don’t allow port forwarding, so I recently switched to Proton. Their CEO’s comments last year still feel disgusting and I trust them as a company far less than I trust Mullvad as a result, but the service they offer is stellar regardless.
From what I understand, Mullvad is the top choice for a privacy-focused daily driver VPN, while Proton is the best choice for torrenting while still functioning just fine for daily use.
IIRC it’s good to get faster downloads on BitTorrent, but I’ve never stumbled upon a torrent that was slow anyway.
I haven’t even looked at port forwarding. I think maybe some ISPs in some countries might block traffic this way but others will know better. Everything just works with Mullvad on Fedora with Qbittorrent, so I’m happy.
Mullvad seemed like the perfect choice and I was happy with them until they killed port forwarding, that got me wanting to switch to something else.
I recently bought a year of AirVPN. Their apps aren’t as nice but it works, and port forwarding works with the same port across all their servers.
I use Wiresock Secure Connect on Windows, and the Eddie app or OpenVPN Connect on Android.
What is it about Mullvad that makes it superior to all other options? I’m open to it, I just need something to justify the higher price.
higher price
$5 is a low price for a service that I trust way more than the others. You should wonder why the alternatives are so cheap.
It’s about $8 CAD / month, which is noticeably more than Air vpn’s ~$5.25 CAD / month (if I signed up for two years). That being said I understand your point, assuming that they have that trust. As someone who isn’t familiar with them though I need to first know why they deserve it more than others. Other people do seem to speak highly of them though and have made some points that are in their favour.
Check their reddit for all the threads with pictures of cities plastered in Mullvad billboards. Then you know why others are cheaper.
Basically, Mullvad has a great track record, seems to legitimately care about privacy rather than just making money.
As for your mention on protonvpn, the founder did say some weird stuff last year, but so far the company itself hasn’t demonstrated any questionable behavior in regards to data, so it’s still considered safe.
Few good things:
- They don’t have ability to keep logs (even if they wanted)
- Their wireguard speeds can keep up with fiber (800mbps with 1gbps fiber)
- I’ve not seen any connection drops.
Downside: No port forwarding, this I’ve remedied with headscale server and tailscale clients. Port forwarding is needed if u want to access your home network from outside
on mint cinnamon, mullvad app prevents auto-suspending and screen timeout, idk if it does that on other distros. spent a full year troubleshooting and lost most of my hair and will to live. accidentally found the solution after switching to ivpn because it became impossible to watch youtube with mullvad
If you aren’t concerned with flashy setups, AirVPN might be something to check into. In terms of cost, 3 months of AirVPN cost roughly about the same as 1 month of PIA.
I tried AirVPN for a couple of weeks but it’s just painfully slow. Bad servers and the better ones are always full.
I will stick to Mullvad.
That’s a valid reason. AirVPN is slower than Mullvad or PIA. AirVPN does fit some use cases better, like multi-port forwarding, but that’s not going to be what everybody is doing. PIA does offer port forwarding but only single port for single instance. To do multiple, you’d have to have multiple sessions running which doesn’t really work well from one machine.
So, if speed is your only criteria, don’t use AirVPN. Better options exist.
The Proton CEO thing was vastly overblown. He is a privacy advocate and expressed support for Trump’s appointment for head of antitrust, as well as criticism of corporate Democrats who stand for big business which was misrepresented as a love of the Republican Party. The only mistake he made was to publish those statements using the official Proton account, which he later apologised for.
Some people, especially the American left, love to virtue signal and predictably they tried to cancel Proton as a result of this pretty minor and irrelevant social media drama. There were some good write-ups at the time which exposed how counterfactual the “pRoToN lOvEs mAgA” arguments were, but I guess feel free to skip over Proton if it really concerns you. It is objectively one of the best choices if you value both privacy and functionality (Proton still has support for port forwarding), which I think are far more relevant areas to be looking at when choosing a VPN for piracy.
Okay but his criticism makes no sense when the FTC under biden actually started taking antitrust seriously and has since lost its teeth again under trump.
And the Proton CEO tweet about Trump looking out for the little guys is such an insane MAGA echo chamber take. It throws the credibility of the entire post into question. Not to mention that it’s a Medium article. Too many red flags that it undermines OP’s point pretty quick.
@emogu @OccasionallyFeralya sorry, this comes from my ignorance, not to polarize or anything like that but, why Medium is a red flag?
It makes a lot of sense if you actually take the time to read his explanation of the context behind his position.
During the Biden administration, the Democrats lead by Schumer (whose family members are lobbyists for big tech) refused to bring antitrust bills Proton campaigned in support of to a vote. Additionally, the only invited senator to show up to a 2024 antitrust meeting was a Republican - Vance. Those are just two examples he cites of Democrats failing in this area and Republicans stepping up in their place.
The crazy thing is that Yen’s argument, that the Democrats have been captured by the corporate donor class, would be supported in any other context by people on reddit and particularly Lemmy. It’s the same thing you guys constantly complain about everywhere else (i.e. Sanders), yet in this one specific instance you ignore all of that and pretend that the Democrats are the good guys who can do no wrong because the idea that they could be as bad as, or worse than, the Republicans in this very specific area triggers you so hard.
Just go with Mullvad
It has its issues but so far the most reasonable.
(If you are in a censorship heavy area, go with something else, Mullvad relies on standard protocols that are easy to inspect and shut down)
you might as well assume that any traffic you send to an american vpn is routed directly to the NSA, FBI, etc. get something that physically resides in a GDPR country. as for price, it’s either that or just drop the P out of VPN
GDPR is not relevant to state monitoring. Article 23 provides the provisions to explicitly restrict data protection rights for the purpose of eavesdropping, detection, crime prevention, etc. Its wildly open ended to the point that it makes no difference in choosing a VPN: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-23-gdpr/
