Free VPN with OpenVPN, KDE Neon and ProtonVPN setup

To do this you are going to need a Protonmail or ProtonVPN account (the accounts are bridged so having one is having the other) and KDE neon installed. I am using 18.04 but it should work on any Debian based KDE distribution. RPM based distros will require changing a couple of commands but I will leave that up to you.

Firstly install openVPN resolvconf and network-manager-openvpn on KDE neon.

sudo apt install openvpn resolvconf network-manager-openvpn

Then go to your account at ProtonVPN and log in. You are going to need three things there.

1. Go to the Account page and get your OpenVPN/IKEv2 Username.
2. On the same page get your OpenVPN/IKEv2 Password.
3. Then go to downloads, choose Linux as your platform, UDP as your protocol, click on Server Configs and choose either the Netherlands, Japan or the United States. When clicking on one of those countries the top servers should be named something like JP-FREE#1. Go to the right of the name and click the arrow to download the config file. It should download a file named something like jp-free-01.protonvpn.com.udp1194.ovpn.

Now you have everything you need to make the connection. If you search on your menu for 'connections' and open the top link your System Settings Module for connections will open. You might find you need to resize this window until at the base you can see the add, remove and export connection symbols. Then click add and scoll right to the bottom where is says 'Import VPN connection', Opening that will open a new window and you should find your .ovpn file (the one you downloaded) and select it. A copy certificates question will pop up where you choose yes and then the .ovpn file will be imported into your connection settings.

If you select this configuration file on the left you will see under the VPN tab that there is a username and password that needs to be filled in. Do so with the username and password you saved from ProtonVPN before. Click OK and you are ready to go.

To use the VPN connection simply click on your networks icon on the right of your desktop taskbar, hover over one of the connections and choose connect.  One connection the little networks icon will get a padlock on it.

For automatic connection you could also go to your main connection in the System Settings Module for connections and under the general tab you should see an option such as 'Automatically connect to this VPN when using this connection'.