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:
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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.
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The app feels cluttered yet simultaneously not very information dense, kind of has the vibe of a las vegas billboard.
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Double Hop depends on using a browser extension.
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Proxy feature (seems to) rely on using a browser extension.
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Bugs:
A. When the VPN is enabled, updatessudo 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. -
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:
- They do have a featureful linux app, despite the bugs I’ve experienced.
- The price is hard to beat
- 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).
- Haven’t used the local proxy feature but it seems useful.
- No hard limit on concurrent or overall connections.
- 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.
- Did I mention price..