Black Friday is around the corner.. In the market for a VPN

Lounge EndeavourOS pub
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With Black Friday weeks away now, I’m seeing that all VPN providers have started offering various discounts.

As I am in search for a VPN provider, which one would you recommend? I want something that will integrate seamlessly on GNOME and be somewhat cheap (I have singled out CyberGhost and Surfshark).

I am open on all suggestions, especially if anyone has first person experience with those two providers.

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Maybe you should add to your post, what you hope to accomplish with a VPN, because there are different considerations based on what you want/need out of a VPN.

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True.. I need an all-arounder, I’m not fixated on Streaming or Downloading per se. My main reason is mostly privacy and secondary maybe downloading from various sources.

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Any one which provides ovpn config files can be easily managed by Network Manager.
You may need to install a couple of extra packages if they are not already installed (by default) in your system.

Basically you would need the following packages:

networkmanager
networkmanager-openvpn
networkmanager-vpn-plugin-openvpn
openvpn

Mullvad is one that come up on top of the search results. I have never used it myself (yet) but I have heard that many of its users are ready to jump off of a cliff for it and land with no harm :winking_face_with_tongue:

PS. I don’t, however, think that they are into Black Stuff Sales business

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IMO, mullvad is what you want but I have never seen them have any black friday deals.

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I’’ll just keep my eyes open for deals on anything I might want for myself or others cause I know for a fact I can always beat the Black Friday “deals”.

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is mullvad much better than nordvpn, surfshark and the others? why? I am also in the market for a vpn my surfshark has expired.

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I guess it depends why you are using a VPN and what you value. I actually use both of these services regularly.

NordVPN:

  • Is very inexpensive. $2-3 per month
  • Like most VPN providers, it some questionable business practices:
    • Sales that are “expiring soon” but seem to always be available
    • Lots of referral-based advertising and paid placement in comparisons
  • Based in Panama
  • Performance and reliability has been mixed for me - Sometimes it is fast and rock solid, other times it is not.

Mullvad

  • It is more expensive $5-6 per month
  • Doesn’t require an email address or any personalized information at all to create an account or maintain service
  • Based in Sweden and has a proven track record of no logging
  • Appears to have clear and ethical business practices
  • Performance and reliability are solid

Fundamentally, Mullvad is the only VPN I have found that feels reasonably trustworthy to me. Your VPN provider is the link in the chain that has my information so trust is important for me.

I use Mullvad in situations where I care about privacy and trust and NordVPN when I don’t.

What I mostly use NordVPN for is to get around regional restrictions or to briefly change my identity. I mostly do this through a browser plugin.

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As far as I can tell, Mullvad has a fixed price of 5€ / month, but Cyberghost and Surfshark cost ~55€ for 26 and 27 months respectively.. Though from what I have been reading maybe Mullvad, from a “security” perspective, is worth the extra money.

I will keep checking, I am not in a hurry..

Of course any suggestion is more than welcome.

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It looks like proton vpn is having their sale. I would trust them a lot more than nord, surfshark and friends.

That being said, if you want the cheapest vpn provider that has decent reliability and speed, it is almost always nordvpn.

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I really like the Mullvad client in KDE. This might be worth thinking about as I seem to remember trying Proton in KDE and it wasn’t great but I can’t remember why. Sluggish app or something. Not talking about the actual VPN service quality.

Nevermind he did say he uses Gnome sorry.

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Does surfshark have any notable issues you know of?

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It has been years since I have looked at it in detail.

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I use PIA (Private Internet Access) and it’s quite cheap, around $2 a month for a 36 month. However, there are some VPN red flags associated with it, though I have had no real issues. Well, I did have one, with regards to traffic rules on split tunnel traffic, but after about a year, they finally fixed it. Otherwise, it’s pretty speedy and has 100s of geo-locations, if that’s important to you.

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I had some issues with Mullvad actually where I would get SSL errors on certain sites, one of which was Github. I contacted support and they said they were aware of it but it went on for ages. I will try it now actually and see if it still does it.

It’s not doing it now but it was only on certain VPN servers it happened on.

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I always prefer mullvad strongly over all other options, but i don’t think they over offer discounts, just one set price. It is one of the better ones for privacy, possibly the best even since you don’t even have to give them identifying information to subscribe to it.

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Have a look at Techlore’s VPN Comparison Tool, and weigh up what’s important to you.

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That is a pretty cool list. I like that is has some of the things that most of the other trackers don’t have like honest marketing, affiliate program and if they are diskless.

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Another vote for Mullvad. They don’t need “Black Friday” deals. They’re dirt cheap already. Best VPN out there, IMHO.

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One other aspect of VPN providers you need to consider is the country they host from (for legal jurisdictions, data extradition, etc.). This guy built a chart that compares a LOT of providers and their privacy focus. https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz/#detailed-vpn-comparison

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