Biggest priority is privacy. Bandwidth and latency aren’t a huge issue as long as it’s good enough to stream a 4k video.
Mullvad has a top notch Linux experience! (and is just solid company overall).
AIrVPN has a decent linux client, less featureful than Mullvad, but does the core things a VPN needs to do, has a solid reputation, and is reasonably cheap.
I’ve used Mullvad for years and am still happy with them. They have no problem keeping up with my 200Mb fiber connection.
No logging (this has been proven), you don’t get a username and password and they don’t ask for your name, email address or other personal information - all you get is an account number with no personal information attached to it.
€5 a month and you can pay in cash, with a credit card, bitcoin, paypal, bank wire and a few other methods. You can even buy monthly or yearly cards from Amazon (think I paid $55 for the last annual card I bought).
Highly recommended.
edit: I just bought another annual card because mine expires next month. $57. Amazon.com: Mullvad VPN | 12 Months for 5 Devices | Protect Your Privacy with Easy-To-Use Security VPN Service
I use Mullvad for years now. Love it.
Mullvad is you don’t need port forwarding, Airvpn if you do.
I’ve been using mullvad for years and it never let’s me down
Biggest priority is privacy
You kind of have to accept at some point you are trusting someone else- it’s turtles all the way down. That is, you are depending on someone else, on infrastructure that you don’t control eventually. Search news about the providers you are considering, see who does/doesn’t have anything questionable pop up/avoid anything no one has heard of and seems too good to be true…probably don’t utilize someone that just started advertising on Reddit and won’t tell you anything publicly but only through DMs(yeah, I saw one of these like a month ago and the person acted like they didn’t get why they seemed super sus) and that’s the best you can hope for.
If you put a small amount of effort in, you’ll get as good of a result as any of us can really reasonably expect to manage. It’s kind of like open source software, you expect any reasonably well known provider is going to have that group of people that are super careful about watching things like service terms and stuff about that provider, and will make a stink about anything questionable happening.
That and remember all the major providers, like anything these days, some amount of people will have had a bad experience with that provider and that will prove how that company is the worst company of all time and you should use some other provider they now like, and the people complaining about that provider are clearly idiots.
Also it’s worth nothing that a many well known providers are owned by the same parent companies. Not a single company, but multiple companies own multiple well known providers. For example, I think PIA and ExpressVPN are owned by the same company. So there’s an extra bit of irony when people are mad at one and not the other.
I have used Private Internet Access for years and I highly recommend them. They have done 3rd party audits to prove the lack of logs. The client gets constant updates, there’s also a native linux client and a cli interface. So you can easily script use it in scripts. If you buy a yearly plan on a deal you get to keep that deal for life. Their adblocking dns is solid (had 1 bad year where it cause more problems that it sovled). The split tunnelling is great, easy to use and just works. You can pick wireguard or openvpn, with timeout reconnects. You can allow local traffic to bypass a service level killswitch so if you client drops the service keeps the killswitch. There’s also a huge amount of servers that allow port-forwarding, last time I checked they had the most servers available for port-forwarding. Combine that with their cli tool you can do some great stuff. They have more servers than anyone else in Au and they have constantly added more. Bandwidth wise I usually get max speeds, with the cli tool I can a server speed checks if my speeds drop under what I want using speedtest.net cli tool.
Most major VPN providers have both OpenVPN and Wireguard config files to seamlessly use them in Linux without the need of any proprietary client, which is the best way to have a VPN. Apart from that, a VPN is as good as it is on Linux as it is on every other OS.
ipvanish. It’s just plain openvpn so you don’t need any 3rd party applications. You just doenload the ovpn config file and you are done
None. If I was the FBI, CIA, or some such, and I wanted to track piracy or terrorism I would do the honeypot. Create a VPN and advertise the shit out of it to convince everyone you absolutely NEED one for anonymity. Now all these guys are going to give me their personal info, like credit card, email and IP address. No need to be a super cyber sleuth! Follow the Pied Piper!
ExpressVPN works for my family. Reliable servers in 105 countries, very little downtime, optimized media streaming, works with every major streaming service, cross platform, fast.
I know it isn’t really a VPN, but Tor is an interesting choice for maximum privacy. However 4k streaming might be complicated.
Nord
Edit: your boos mean nothing, I’ve seen what you cheered for.
I had Mulvad for a while really liked them and thier location.
But last I checked no port forwarding. And you had to run thier app,
If those two are not deal killers Mulvad is a solid choice.
I loudly second everything you said about PIA. Great company, great apps, great service.
Yeah nah. Tor is slow for starters. And malicious exit nodes are a thing. Like running sslstrip for example.
Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing
I have Nord. I was really leaning Mullvad, but then Nord came in with a sweetheart deal and 95% of the features, so here I am.
Not sure about the status of port forwarding but you don’t need to use their app. You can just download wireguard/OpenVPN files and import them into networkmanager.