The only VPNs which are not owned by marketing companies are Mullvad and Proton. The largest VPNs are owned by Kape Technologies, renamed because their prior company name distributed malware, whose top people are former Israeli military, so I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them. I would never use a free VPN except for Proton, and Proton's paid VPN has a lot more nodes and features.

Proton and mullvad are the two best options I know of.

Pretty much any VPN provider is usable on Linux though, network manager can handle wireguard or openvpn configs just fine. Your biggest concern should be trustworthiness.

Mullvad has an open source client. It can also be set up usung OpenVPN too.

Bear in mind they don't have Port Forwarding anymore.

I'm a Proton slave, all my eggs are in their basket so I'll go ahead and provide some free marketing for them. ProtonVPN is pretty good since it's ran by a good company that cares about you, getting Port Forwarding setup on Linux is a bit of a chore but I believe they're working on automating it, the Windows app does have it automated already by the way.

I do worry about the long-term practicality of ProtonVPN because of this manual process, since as far as I can tell there's no way to automatically hand your assigned port to the torrent client...

im having very good results with proton/openvpn using gluetun

Mullvad if you're a stickler for privacy.

I use Mullvad

Mullvad, it has ipv6 and works on linux even if you don't use NetworkManager. Protonvpn doesn't have ipv6 and only works with networkmanager

Also last I checked, mullvad wireguard works in the app, whereas proton requires special setup

I'll vouch for airvpn. I've been using it for probably six years now with no issues. When using wireguard I can download Linux isos at 500mbps.

• Mullvad: Very privacy focused, ok priced, very robust. Sadly they removed port forwarding not too long ago.
• AirVPN: Good speeds, many servers, cheap, port fowarding.
• ProtonVPN: Works well, specially if you like the idea of getting their services together (mail, cloud, vpn)

Pick one that has a wireguard config generator, so you don't need to use any client software besides the normal linux wg client.

I'd also look for one that accepts anonymous payment methods. Even if you don't intend to go to the trouble to use that yourself, it's probably a good sign if it's available. Mullvad is pretty safe and served me well until they stopped doing port forwarding. Proton, windscribe, azire, and airvpn were the ones that seemed most recommended when I went to look for a new one a few months ago.

Your OS doesn't matter when picking a VPN provider.

Others have mentioned plenty of good options.

I just use Mullvad with wireguard, not very hard to setup.

Anything that's openvpn compatible will work but requires some setup

Im using mullvad and happy with it on Ubuntu LTS

Mullvad is good and has a decent price

As you may read elsewhere, Mullvad and ProtonVPN are the go-to for many people. But what Linux distro are you running? both of them don't have an OFFICIAL client for Arch, you can install them from the AUR though but I read the from proton rep in reddit that they don't recommend these packages as they're handled by the community.

OS doesn't matter. And windows with crapware removed runs just as well. (OMG, there is so much crapware on the barebones install)

If you wanna torrent make sure it supports port forwarding.

I'm on Proton. It's easy to set up on Ubuntu and Ubuntu like systems. I'm on Mint. Haven't tried it on other distros.

I really like airvpn.

I use Proton VPN to bypass censorship. Use Remote Torrenting for torrent.

Proton VPN is good and has a good free plan, but os doesn't matter when choosing a VPN