Its time to share the wiki and get your friends on board the ship as we set sail. We all have to rally together to stop the neverending subscription model.
is PIA still a decent VPN? What about torrent clients? I used to use an older version of uTorrent but now I'm on Kubuntu and it has a built in torrent client.
Short answer by making a few assumptions: Don't patronize PIA unless you can't or don't want to pay for better, and the built in torrent client is fine if you're happy with it, but qBittorrent would be a good match with your desktop environment if you want to try something else.
Happy to answer questions in like 10h when i'm awake again lol
Per @rambos@lemm.ee it depends at least to some degree on your needs. Mullvad is a popular and well-respected option (though it is the very provider rambos is alluding to because they recently removed the port forwarding feature because there was no way to implement it without negatively impacting privacy - a positive thing for privacy, but a negative thing for those who need the feature). I'm also a fan of IVPN because they open source all of their very high-quality clients (as do Mullvad) and they cater to a more technical audience. Proton has been getting some decent press recently for open sourcing their clients, but there's a rumor going around that they're actually reselling NordVPN which is one of the less reputable providers.
Happy to provide more points of interest with more context on your needs.
Thanks for the detailed reply and no problem, I know how easy it is to get busy lol.
Can you comment on the yearly price difference between the two? My only concern is everything lately is seeing price increases. Also which would you say would be best speed wise, and does either have limitations on the number of devices?
Really appreciate you taking the time to answer, because it’s so hard to choose these days.
Billing-wise Mullvad bills in Euro and IVPN in USD. IVPN standard (2 devices) is priced about the same as Mullvad (5 devices), or IVPN pro is about another third higher-priced but has a 7-device limit. See IVPN pricing, Mullvad pricing. Mullvad is most likely the best bang for your buck of the two.
PIA is owned by Kape Technologies., a dodgy company, founded by a member is Israel’s Intelligence Devision. They’re known to spread malware, steal users data, and redirect traffic to advertisers. That being said, PIA claims that despite being owned by Kape, they remain in control of their day-to-day operations. I haven’t heard of any major issues, since the acquisition. Kape also seems to like the profitability of their (several) VPNs.
Up to you if you trust them with your data. Personally, I do not.
PIA is pretty shady. I'm only still using them because I paid for multiple years of service and while they're a bad choice for privacy, it does the job of not making my ISP angy.
I signed up for a lifetime price of PIA because it was very cheap and have been using it ever since, but recently I noticed they doubled the charge out of the blue on me with no notice.