Mullvad is great for privacy. But it's blocked by pretty much every VPN block list. NordVPN at the very least bypasses all the ones I regularly encounter.

I do use Mullvad for most web browsing though. But Imgur for example is blocked on it, and it's blocked in the UK, so I need NordVPN if I want to see any images there.

Most people's VPN usage is literally just geolocation restrictions and Nord is really good at that.

Aren't proxies good enough for that purpose?

The user experience differs for proxies.

System wide proxy configuration doesn’t actually always work system wide.

A VPN tends to have more success in encapsulating all application traffic (or all desired application traffic, if you’re so inclined to configure your system)

I regularly go to imgur via mullvad, exit Netherlands.

I love and use mullvad myself but I don't think they are very competitive for the average person. They mostly just care about getting around geo blocks on websites and streaming services, which mullvad puts 0 effort into facilitating.

It became less of a choice for many after they sadly had to disable port forwarding.

Yeah, their reasoning is solid (easy to abuse) but it is still a very useful feature.

AFAIK, at the moment your choices are AirVPN and ProtonVPN. AirVPN has static port forwarding and Proton has UPNP port forwarding.

private internet access has port forwarding too

PIA is not to be trusted after their buyout, IMHO

Not only Eddie, their account control panels and site in general look like something from the 90s, and it seriously hampers their business. I can't recommend them to anyone that isn't highly technical. And even then, as a technical user, why do I manually have to select one of 10-20 servers within a city or region, why am I being asked to manually load balance? Why is there no Wireguard over port 53 or 443?

It makes more sense when you know they're privacy activists first, businessmen second. But Mullvad shows you can be pro privacy and still offer great UX and a sleek site and client.

Btw, if you're managing things in CLI, you could take a look at their Hummingbird Suite. AFAIK it has a killswitch.

What sucks with Proton is that you can't share the VPN account with friends, because it is tied to your Proton account. They should create a vpn.proton.me subdomain that you can create a special managed account on that can only touch the VPN settings.

>Btw, if you're managing things in CLI, you could take a look at their Hummingbird Suite. AFAIK it has a killswitch.

Hummingbird doesn't support wireguard iirc, which is a deal breaker

Been buying mullvad for the last 4-5 years but oftentimes I can’t even browse the fucking New York Times website due to low bandwidth, let alone stream anything. At this point, I just keep adding time to my account just in case, without using it.

I wish I could use Mullvad. But their IPs are banned from many streaming services and they don't change them often enough so I am stuck with Nord.

I would just pirate at that point. You're paying for the streaming service anyways. Use mullvad to download the torrent :). I'm pretty sure they ignore dmca requests. Not that they even know their customer's names if you pay with Mullvad amazon card.

Not to mention holding companies which snap up 15 competing VPNs and whitelabel most of them.

Mullvad seems to care and be competent about privacy, but most average VPN users aren’t seeking the most extreme privacy. They just want something cheap that lets them do geolocation things or access the most websites.

The average VPN user is knowledge-less. At best their internet usage data is being sold to third party analytics companies. At worst third parties are routing their own bots through their local connection.

You do know that NordSec maintains its own rust fork of BoringTun: https://github.com/NordSecurity/NepTUN ? :)

There is also https://github.com/firezone/boringtun which is a fork by https://www.firezone.dev/