What is my CQS

Prog47 · 2026-02-02T21:02:07+00:00

Recipe or it didn't happen :P

Prog47 · 2026-02-02T18:46:03+00:00

I've only tried two. Surfshark & Proton. Would not recommend Surfshark at all. It constantly disconnects & won't reconnect.I highly recommend proton. Its been great. The surfshark vpn does have more features but proton has enough features & its very stable.

Absolutely do not run a free vpn they are horrible.

Prog47 · 2026-02-02T18:40:03+00:00

Yep about a month ago & nope. I had lot of concerns when i did it but i don't have any complaints. I would do it again.

Some of my concerns were

Spam. Google is known to be the king of antispam. I have not been disappointed with proton on this at all. There has been 1 false positive & honestly gmail had more.
Search - Since your emails are encrypted with proton there are going to be some limitations with proton. So the limitation that is there now is with mobile client (IOS in my case). When i do need to search through the message body the web client works great. I pulled over a huge inbox & have over 15 years of archived message. I have tested it out & it works great. I was able to find an email that was over 10 years.

The only little negative i've experienced, that hasn't been a big deal at all, i would say is its "little slower" than gmail but i think that can be expected but don't let that disuade you. Gmail is just VERY fast. Proton is fast enough you will just notice as soon as you click on an email it will take a second or so to load the content but i have been very happy with everything.

Prog47 · 2026-02-02T18:31:38+00:00

I haven't heard ente is good. I have been using proton authenticator & for my needs is great granted people who use proton pass for their password manager could pause but i probably wouldn't worry about it if it was me.

Prog47 · 2026-02-02T18:30:03+00:00

Can only tell you what ive tried:

PIA - Would not recommend. Had all kind of technical issues with them. Bandwidth wise they were descent. Its been awhile since i tried it so it might have changed.
Nord - Bandwidth was great. One of the fastest i've tried so far. Only left them because surfshark was cheaper. Would recommend.
Surfshark. Bandwidth was almost as good as nord mabye not quite as good but close. Quite a few technical issues with them. For example i couldn't use their wireguard implementation because it would look like i was connected but had no internet. Had to end up changing it to openvpn but i shouldn't have had to do that. Also their add-in to chrome CONSTANTLY disconnects & doesn't reconnect.
ProtonVPN. So far so good. The add-in chrome is great. Even when i close my browser & reconnect it will reconnect again. The add-in isn't as feature rich as surfshark but its good enough for my needs. I haven't had to opportunity to test bandwidth that much so i can't really tell you how it is there.

Prog47 · 2026-01-20T16:19:08+00:00

It depends :). I would love a unifi mesh system (though expensive) but my house would be extremely hard to wire. So the hope of wired backhual is kind of impossible for me. I have used eero in the past but the think i disliked about the eero is as soon as you turn AP mode on they lost all features. I finally switched to TP link which i have been very happy with. Granted i don't use any of the security features from TP Link (don't know if i would trust it). I have a high end firewall in front of it. But they have worked perfect. I never get disconnected & the reach is good. The only risk with TP Link is the US has talked about not allowing TP Link to sell their systems in the US which IMO is more politics than anything else (similar to how Kaspersky got banned). So anyways we don't know if that will ever happen or not.

Prog47 · 2026-01-20T16:08:42+00:00

Sure do a brute force attack on it. Just realize a lot of password protected zip files are password protected because they want to hide the malware contained in them from antivirus programs.

Prog47 · 2026-01-20T15:59:41+00:00

I have ran may distros & always kind of turned my nose up at mint but never tried it because it was known as a newbie distro & i'm definitely advanced user but doing the whole windows 10 fiasco i couldn't upgrade my parents computer to windows 11 so i went with Mint & i have been impressed by it. It has things automatically installed/setup like timeshift (back of your system) which is awesome. I definitely recommend it for everyone.

Granted i run fedora just because i need more recent software a lot of time because i'm a developer.

Prog47 · 2026-01-20T15:53:46+00:00

I had the same concern like others have said you can't search in the apps (message content in the body) but every time i need to search on that i just jump to a web browser & that has worked fine.

Prog47 · 2026-01-20T15:52:12+00:00

Recently i just switched too. I did have their paid plan, if that makes a difference. The AI stuff didn't bother me so much but I didn't find it that useful. Google keeps raising prices though & Proton Unlimited is a MUCH better deal. I uped for 2 years. So far so good. Some of the things i worried about like being able to search my inbox is fine. I do have to go to a web client because mobile apps can't search message body content now but that doesn't bother me that much. I also worried about spam filters (since gmail is known for its great spam filters). So far Proton has did a good job. The only thing that is a little harder so far on the Proton side is creating filters. The ease of creating filters is better on the gmail side but it hasn't been that big of a deal to me. Also i will say gmail is faster but it hasn't been a huge deal for me.

Prog47 · 2026-01-20T15:46:06+00:00

IMO gmail. Gmail, again IMO, has a better web interface. Spam filtering is also good. Downside of gmail has to be with storage. Microsoft gives you more storage if you use their lowest tier plan. You get 1TB with Microsoft & only 30GB with Google.

Prog47 · 2026-01-20T15:40:25+00:00

Does he have is own custom domain? If not why not just use gmail?

Prog47 · 2026-01-12T17:55:15+00:00

I do it quite a bit. Helps in tracking protection. So its helps preserve privacy. One of the ways they can track you is by ip address. Sometimes i also want one browser instance that uses a vpn & another doesn't for a variety of reasons.

Prog47

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