Linux users can now install the official Mozilla VPN client from Flathub, making access to its paid-for, privacy-minded service more readily accessible to Linux users.
The Mozilla VPN Flatpak is current in the process of verification (reminder: Linux Mint does hides unverified Flatpak apps in its Software Manager by default, so if you’re reading from there, keep that in mind) but is an official upload, maintained by Mozilla directly.
The Mozilla VPN client is open source software and although it is already available to install on Ubuntu-based distributions as a DEB package from the Mozilla APT repo, packages for other Linux distributions were not provided, with such users advised to ‘compile it from source’.
That makes the arrival of the Mozilla VPN client on Flathub, the most popular desktop1 Linux app store, all the more notable — the official Mozilla VPN extension for Firefox is Windows only, too.
Using an official desktop client is not strictly necessary to use most VPNs on Linux, but having one is certainly convenient (hence the positive reaction to the recent NordVPN Linux GUI addition).
Is Mozilla VPN worth using? I haven’t used it, and it is but one of many VPNs available to Linux users and beyond. I won’t be acting as a marketing arm of Mozilla to upsell you on it being the best VPN for Linux, but its features are as follows:
- Connect up to 5 devices
- More than 500 servers in 30+ countries
- Fast network speeds even while gaming
- No logging, tracking or sharing of network data
- No bandwidth restrictions or throttling
- Device protection, multi-hop routing and more
Visit the Mozilla website to sign up for or otherwise learn more about Mozilla VPN. There’s only one “plan” available, costing from $9.99 a month or, for those willing to pay upfront for a year’s access, from $4.99 a month (offer price; will go up).
If you’re an existing subscriber and want to install the Flatpak build, you can install it through your preferred GUI or via the CLI (assuming you’ve setup it up):
flatpak install flathub org.mozilla.vpn
Once installed, launch the app, proceed to login, and configure things as you need.
- In terms of breadth of software and use across different desktop Linux distributions. Arguably, the Snap Store has to most widely used on account of 1) Ubuntu’s install base, 2) preinstalling snaps (which update automatically), and 3) Ubuntu’s IoT footprint that relies on snaps heavily. ↩︎