Beta Desktop Software Discussion
I didn't see a thread or any other place for feedback (except for bugs), so I created a new one so those using the desktop beta software can share their thoughts.
With v78-6b0c837, favorites were added. This is a dramatic improvement for the UI. This should be pushed to the main branch ASAP.
v78-2f1e283 introduced an option to connect by country rather than region, which I think is fairly pointless. Most countries have only one region selection anyway. Does this auto-connect to a region in the selected country with the best ping? Even so, it seems not all [US-based] servers support P2P, which would further its pointlessness for those using P2P services.
As of now, I haven't encountered any bugs with either version.
With v78-6b0c837, favorites were added. This is a dramatic improvement for the UI. This should be pushed to the main branch ASAP.
v78-2f1e283 introduced an option to connect by country rather than region, which I think is fairly pointless. Most countries have only one region selection anyway. Does this auto-connect to a region in the selected country with the best ping? Even so, it seems not all [US-based] servers support P2P, which would further its pointlessness for those using P2P services.
As of now, I haven't encountered any bugs with either version.
Comments
But yes, I can confirm this is going to the main branch. The betas are prereleases, this one being v78. When we judge all major bugs are fixed, the last v78 build gets released (with its version number and beta tag removed) publicly as the main download. Shortly after, a v79 beta will show up with all the changes planned for v79 already being worked on. When v79 is ready, same thing happens: v79 goes public, and a v80 beta will appear.
And yes, PIA supports P2P on every server. We go as far as transparently double-VPN'ing you as needed so that you don't have to manually pick P2P friendly servers. What the US servers don't have however is port forwarding, which is usually used together with P2P. And the reason we don't have port forwarding there is that we'd become responsible for the traffic "hosted" behind PIA's servers which would force us to log to pass the blame, or deal with the legal trouble ourselves.
Concerning the P2P: I had presumed that it routed to a different server for P2P, but even then, I've noticed explicit non-working P2P on some servers, namely the Chicago based servers. Perhaps that's just due to latency between there and the closest available P2P server.
I didn't insinuate they were censoring anything, but rather, some simply didn't work. My best guess was that either the server was clogged, some server error was happening, or as I mentioned above, the latency was too great. I also never use port forwarding, still get fine P2P speeds (on servers that work for me). I'll try doing that on a server where it's enabled and compare the speed difference.