Hello all,
I feel like I’ve tried every possible way to get PIA to work and have been left frustrated at every turn.
The official installation script from PIA themselves tries to install iptables as a dependency, which conflicts with iptables-nft. pacman -Qii iptables-nft shows that it’s required by iproute2. Do I need iproute2 or iptables-nft? I’m not sure, but messing with core network functionality sketches me out, so I can’t use the official application.
Next, I looked for alternatives in the AUR, coming up with piawgcli which purported to create wireguard configurations for PIA. The config is spat out worked… sort of. It would connect and show as a real connection, but that connection would never accept any traffic, even from applications directed exclusively into it. Another alternative, pia-manager happily created dozens of openvpn configurations in the KDE network management interface, but none of them would work. The connection failed outright. piavpn-bin, which I gather is an AUR specific version of the official PIA application. It installs just fine, but when I launch it, it sits at the initial loading interface indefinitely.
Finally, I tried using their official OpenVPN configuration generator. I imported the configuration file using KDE’s network management interface, added my username and password to it, and tried to connect. It sat, spinning on the “connecting” message endlessly, just like the piavpn-bin package.
Has anyone installed PIA recently who has some advice? I know they aren’t the “best” VPN out there, but I have a year of subscription time I’d like to not waste before switching to something else.
