So based on some of the previous posts when I get more into the technical shit on my equipment should I use something different than ProtonVPN? I do like the password manager and email service they provide which was the primary reason I got them. Should I just have Mullvad as a secondary VPN service, or is most of this just major austism complaints?
It's a little of both tbh.
TLDR:
if you buy into the Proton ecosystem, Proton Mail is basically worth its weight in gold especially with Simple Login integration. If you need a standalone VPN and nothing else, go Mullvad.
a) Proton Mail? Genuinely excellent stuff. Email as a medium is fundamentally flawed, I don't care so much about "anonymity" (there's no such thing as anonymous email) as I do "pseudonymity," and paying into Proton nets you access to Simple Login. Basically addy.io but less shit. I've been using Bitwarden long before Proton Pass ever emerged, I'm sure Proton Pass is good stuff, but I just don't need it. I also never touched Proton Drive beyond sheer novelty because cloud storage is a fundamentally bad idea regardless of Google, Microsoft, or Proton AG doing it.
b) Proton VPN? This is where I'm hideously ambivalent. It
was really good when I first bought into it back in 2020, where Proton AG merged the subscriptions for Proton Mail and Proton VPN together. The Windows and Mac applications are really pretty, they get the job done, and it still felt really robust in the pre-WireGuard days. Post-WireGuard, especially on Linux, the GUI-first paradigm kinda just sucked eggs? I mean, it gets the job done but you're basically stuck with GNOME or KDE with DBus assumptions... and this is a stark shift from Proton's original approach to Linux VPNs where they had a really robust and fairly simple CLI client. That client's
gone now and it sucks for anything headless/home server related. If you're a normie using a GTK or Qt-based desktop environment, Proton VPN
is adequate. The client is horrifically ugly compared to Windows and Mac, but it gets the job done for torrenting and bypassing media restrictions. For my use case with a home media server where I'm running self-hosted qBitTorrent integrated with Radarr/Sonarr/Jellyfin? Proton is fucking appalling.
If you're not doing some turbo autismo bullshit like I am with a home server,
docker-compose.yml shenanigans, and you're basically using Linux GUI-first with a DE like GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, or even MATE, Proton VPN is more than good enough. You even have WireGuard and OpenVPN configs accessible to you if the need arises, which
is how I'm running things at the moment. I just needed to get all that bullshit out of my system because I was
bashing my head against the proverbial wall trying to get things to work cleanly and it just wasn't... for days on end.
Because I already have forty fucking WINE prefixes, that's why. That's as many as four tens, and that is terrible. I'd prefer not to make it 41, but guess I'll have to. WINE prefixes are a great application of a deduplicating overlay filesystem; I wonder if DwarFS could be applied, somehow. Also, VSCodium failed to compile directly off the AUR, because of course it did.
Good point; sorry for not realising that sooner. It also just occurred to me that this problem basically gets kicked into overdrive when you're doing anything gaming related because wine-staging, Proton, and assorted variants
always take up like 1.5GB for each goddamn prefix. You ever played Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and noticed how the Prefix is basically the same size as a DX9 game from 2003? Shit blows.
