What happened to Pure VPN.... used to be awesome

Like many, I’m a long term subscriber and have had little to no problems with the company and its products until recently. Have successfully used them on Linux and Windows for many many years.

Now, nothing works anymore, support has become non existent, their software dies all the time, and connections no longer…er… connect

My latest adventure was trying to get it to work on Linux (Mint 20), where its worked wonderfully for years and years. Heck, I ended up subscribing because they actually HAD a Linux client. But now, it seldom connects, tells me there’s an upgrade version all the time, etc.

So today, against my better judgement, I fell for the update. It totally borked my entire system, and I had to roll back. I couldn’t log in, couldn’t change my password, I’d get a 404 screen from a link THEY sent me (Pure VPN that is). There support pages are out of sync with their websites pages, referring to links and account tools that simply do not exist. I couldn’t even find where it installed itself on my Linux system, which definitely is disturbing. So I completely removed the software and rolled back to a much older version, which seems to work for now at least.

I also spent an hour trying to chat with support. This used to be fantastic, now, basically completely useless.

I have a couple other VPN services that we use for various uses, but Pure VPN was always a reliable all around product. I have a renewal coming up in a few weeks, and candidly, I don’t think I’m going to renew even though its relatively affordable.

What a mess… another thing that was good that has now become terrible. Oh well

Things were working reliably until 6 weeks ago. Some of their nodes don’t seem to work at all, while others are semi tolerable. They’re trying to shift their image to a security company, and it is looking like they may be blocking/throttling some of their traffic.

And their support is, awful. It takes an hour or more to talk to someone that doesn’t ask you to do something impossible (e.g. they always ask me to install a piece of Window’s software to check open ports when I’ve told them several times, I’m on Linux).

Hi, we apologize for the app update link that is available on the CLI application. Although our CLI application is supported on Mint, our GUI application is not supported on Mint yet. It is developed and is in the testing phase currently.
We’ve sent you a DM to assist you and help you solve the issue you’re facing.

Don’t use the app, install it manually on Linux, way more reliable. Here’s a quick video on how to do it:

For mint, pop os, Ubuntu and pretty much any other Debian releases

Yeah, I’m on Linux too (Mint), and it was always pretty reliable as a vpn. I used the CLI to run their vpn software and it almost always worked.

But they did some goofy “app” looking thing for Linux now, and it installed itself somewhere I could simply not find in the file system, nor would it allow me to authenticate.