I just need a VPN to download Linux ISOs from Torrent and newsgroups. PIA seems to be $80 for 3 years and they have been around for a long time. Some post are suggesting that they belong to a company with government ties and shit. Should I be concerned? There is any other VPN in that price range?
Mullvad is great, but they just very recently took away the option of port forwarding, so torrenting with it is a problem now when it comes to seeding.
I've been using PIA for probably over 10 years and haven't had an issue even after they were sold. Last I heard they still don't keep records so there's nothing to worry about.
I see another problem with PIA, apparently they rotate their wireguard keys and is not possible to use wireguard in routers or vanilla Linux. So OpenVPN is the only protocol that can be used on that case.
I've used PIA for a long time, but since I moved my email & file share stuff to Proton, I've switched to Proton VPN. I'm using the paid version, but they do have a free version too. Proton VPN Free is subsidized by paid users (like me!) and as far as I can tell the only difference between paid and free is that there are fewer free endpoints.
I switched from Mullvad to Surfshark (total crap) only for video restrictions. Mullvad doesn’t unlock some services. However for torrenting and general improvement privacy is the best.