Opinions on Windscribe VPN?

I’ve been using Windscribe as of a couple months ago.

I’ve had a pretty mediocre experience with some bugs and just general frustrations (some probably linux specific). Compared with Mullvad my constructive critisms are:

  1. Technical documentation is lacking, they seem to devote a lot more focus edge marketing towards the teenage-torrenting crowd than to writing good detailed docs. I don’t really mind the ‘edgy’ marketing stuff, so long as it doesn’t come at the expense of good documentation, or a good service.

    A. Community doesn’t seem especially technical either, so the subreddit hasn’t been super useful for finding answers to technical questions.

  2. The app feels cluttered yet simultaneously not very information dense, kind of has the vibe of a las vegas billboard.

  3. Double Hop depends on using a browser extension.

  4. Proxy feature (seems to) rely on using a browser extension.

  5. Bugs:
    A. When the VPN is enabled, updates sudo dnf upgrade, and applications including Firefox, Thunderbird, Freetube, and iirc Brave would take literally minutes to open. (I was able to find a workaround that solved this).
    B. The connection would drop intermittantly (kind of normal for a VPN in my experience) and nothing short of a full system restart would allow me to reconnect or even disable the firewall/“killswitch” (not restarting the app, not restarting the systemd services, not even a full logout). This would happen at least daily. I’m using a Beta version now and it seems the problem may have been solved.
    C. A separate issue with dropped connections, where the only way to reconnect was by switching from Wireguard to OpenVPN.

  6. Kind of minor complains / personal preferences:
    A. No option to download config files at the state/country/region level or ‘best connection’ type option. So if I import a wireguard config into NetworkManager it must be for a single specific server.
    B. No ability to create custom lists of VPN servers like I could with Mullvad.

What I do like about Windscribe:

  1. They do have a featureful linux app, despite the bugs I’ve experienced.
  2. The price is hard to beat
  3. Except for the criticisms above (some of which have been mitigated), most things just work (as a Linux user, I never expect that to be the case with VPN clients).
  4. Haven’t used the local proxy feature but it seems useful.
  5. No hard limit on concurrent or overall connections.
  6. Most of my issues are probably either Linux specific or would not be relevant to casual VPN users who just want a simple VPN and don’t care about double hop, proxies, custom lists, or technical docs.
  7. Did I mention price..
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