Unless you know what to do, and this is not intuitive at all, your linux PC will lose internet connection, if the app crashes or freezes, which both happen fairly often. Or, if you reboot with VPN running. In either case, VPN does not cleanly exit, instead, it places a permanent redirect to ‘nowhere’, which you can only see with a special terminal command. All this happening with ‘kill switch’ OFF.
Here is what one needs to do to fix the internet issue:
Execute the following in your terminal:
nmcli connection show --active
If it shows anything other than wired/ethernet and wifi, delete other entries: in case of Proton, you’d have some weird ipv6 connection shown with ‘pvpn’ prefix. Delete it with the following:
sudo nmcli connection delete pvpn (whatever the name is)
This will immediately restore the Internet on your PC.
I use it on a semi-daily basis and had little issues after I stopped turning my computer off with the VPN connected, honestly I’d rather have proton do this than my ip being leaked when something bad actually happpens.
I keep trying Linux as a desktop os and these issues are why I leave. Also, updates messing up nvidia drivers which I just can’t be bothered to fix anymore.
I often reboot with the vpn running and never have any issue with the app. I am on endeavorOS
Proton disables ipv6 which the routes traffic to a black hole, this does get left on if the app crashes. But it can just be disabled in your network managers gui since it shows there
You just saved my life! Thank you!
- Proton should read this.
Its a shame for proton. I was only able to uninstall Proton VPN.
But without Internet, how should you reinstall it?
Besides this would not have changed anything.
I was about to through this Computer into the garbage.
And I am not a dummy. Thanks again!
This is the post I was looking for a year ago when I first installed it on my Kali. I was going crazy for a week searching for a solution. Couldn’t find 1 and eventually figured it out on my own. Same command.
Last time I used it on Fedora it wouldn’t even load the app properly and get stock. Lol. The Android app is brilliant though. I don’t know why the desktop Linux app sucks sooo much. I’ve already uninstalled it.
I use protonvpn-cli in Linux Mint and I have not have one issue with it. What flavor Linux are you using if I may ask? I have noticed that some distributions handle networking better than others. Through my personal experience, Mint and Ubuntu seem to work fairly well with protonvpn.
The Linux app has been an unusable mess for at least a year. Barely works, generated a thousand error modals on sleep, breaks the internet and even fully borked my install once so far. Very disappointing, seriously considering switching to Mullvad - enough is enough.