Browse securely on Ubuntu using this easy-to-use VPN

For a long time, using VPN on Ubuntu has been a hustle. You had to be a premium member of whatever VPN service you prefer, then you had to download OpenVPN configuration files and import them to Ubuntu Settings. Most often, something would break and you’d end up rebooting into windows altogether. Then comes Windscribe.

Windscribe is a new VPN service that’s been operational for a little over a year now and they’ve been steadily growing, adding features based on customer feedback. Like many other VPN services, they offer browser add-ons for the big names; Google Chrome, Opera, and Firefox. They have a Windows desktop client and they’ve recently launched a beta for Linux.

Windscribe beta for #linux is out. See https://t.co/xza1v8X5nZ for details. Available for all users. pic.twitter.com/M9aMiW2DKB

— Windscribe (@windscribecom) July 20, 2017

I had a chance to try it out and thought I’d share with you my experience of setting it up.

You can still use the OpenVPN config file method if that works for you as it is fully supported. However, I think the native Linux app method is a little easier. You will need to be running one of their supported distros; Ubuntu 17.04, 16.04 or 14.04; Debian 8 or 9, Fedora 22+ or CentOS 6+. Currently, only x64 systems are supported. To do this, first, head on to Windscribe’s Linux page and get the .deb binaries for your respective OS. I used Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

1. You will then need to create a Windscribe account here.
2. You will need to add the Windscribe key to apt. To do this, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and paste this :

                 sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com —recv-key FDC247B7

3. Add the repository to your sources.list

echo ‘deb https://repo.windscribe.com/ubuntu trusty main’ | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/windscribe-repo.list

4. Run sudo apt-get update

5. Install windscribe-cli

sudo apt-get install windscribe–cli

6. Login to Windscribe

windscribe login

7. Connect to Windscribe

windscribe connect

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If you need help? Simply run

windscribe –help

8. Disconnect the VPN type

windscribe disconnect

To connect to any of the free servers, simply run windscribe connect (country abbreviation eg. GB for United Kingdom, de for Germany, us for the United States and so on.)

Upon sign up, you get 10GB of free bandwidth. This is by far the most generous allocation of any VPN service out there. Give it a try and tell us what your experience is.