i'm just gonna drop some things to search for yourself, theres plenty of good tutorials out there.
buy the newest rasperry pi and automate all your shit.
pihole - kills ads.
openvpn - setup your vpn, and direct ALL your traffic through it. if you use your raspberry as torrentbitch, tunneling it through vpn will make your ping stable while gaming as it counts as 1 connection to the outside instead of a couple hundred.
seedbox - use transmission to torrent stuff, which works together with:
sonar - webinterface for a suite that automatically looks for tv-series and torrents them for you (add 'jacket' to use more torrentsites as search option)
tvheadend - hook up a usb tv-card and you got your own tv recorder/streamer
nextcloud - i use freefilesync to backup all my documents to a 2nd harddrive on windows, and nextcloud then syncs it to 2 of my raspberries, if you have stuff you simply DONT want to lose, its a very comfortable setup.
I found one of those social media deals for "keepsolid" vpn, a lifetime subscription for around $50 I think. Its not that fast but I only use it for my torrent machine so its good enough that I haven't received any copyright notices in 4 years of use.
Easy to set up even on Linux.
Can't help you for "normal" usage though, I doubt that connection would be fast enough.
If you're technically inclined at all you might consider maintaining your own VPN server. A raspberry pi would almost certainly handle the load for a single user, and there appears to be a number of companies that will host a pi in a datacenter for pretty cheap. Then you would know exactly what your VPN provider was (not) logging. Though of course you'd still need to trust the datacenter colocating your "server".
ShadowSocks seems to be the way to go if you want full control.
Nothing wrong with ExpressVPN for a simple solution but if/when it drops it blocks your Internet to protect you from sites finding your actual IP. That can be annoying if you are on a network seeking to often stop VPNs from working on it as you'll have to reconnect to a server which works (Which depending on the network you are on takes time).
SetUpVPN has a free for 500 megabytes or so per month if you want to give that a spin, throttles bandwidth on free and fully paid version though so YouTube and streaming are not likely for you.
PIA got sold to a company run by a bunch of shady ex-Israeli Intel types.
I'm planning on moving to ProtonVPN myself.
Second vote for proton.
For starters:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/dz2w53/our_merger_with_kape_technologies_addressing_your/
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivateInternetAccess/comments/e0kq68/longtime_pia_user_here_run_dont_walk_away_from/
i'm just gonna drop some things to search for yourself, theres plenty of good tutorials out there.
buy the newest rasperry pi and automate all your shit.
pihole - kills ads.
openvpn - setup your vpn, and direct ALL your traffic through it. if you use your raspberry as torrentbitch, tunneling it through vpn will make your ping stable while gaming as it counts as 1 connection to the outside instead of a couple hundred.
seedbox - use transmission to torrent stuff, which works together with:
sonar - webinterface for a suite that automatically looks for tv-series and torrents them for you (add 'jacket' to use more torrentsites as search option)
tvheadend - hook up a usb tv-card and you got your own tv recorder/streamer
nextcloud - i use freefilesync to backup all my documents to a 2nd harddrive on windows, and nextcloud then syncs it to 2 of my raspberries, if you have stuff you simply DONT want to lose, its a very comfortable setup.
I found one of those social media deals for "keepsolid" vpn, a lifetime subscription for around $50 I think. Its not that fast but I only use it for my torrent machine so its good enough that I haven't received any copyright notices in 4 years of use.
Easy to set up even on Linux.
Can't help you for "normal" usage though, I doubt that connection would be fast enough.
What browser would you recommend? Brave?
Firefox used to be my browser of choice till I found George Soros has his dick in it.
I'll look into Pale Moon.
If you're technically inclined at all you might consider maintaining your own VPN server. A raspberry pi would almost certainly handle the load for a single user, and there appears to be a number of companies that will host a pi in a datacenter for pretty cheap. Then you would know exactly what your VPN provider was (not) logging. Though of course you'd still need to trust the datacenter colocating your "server".
ShadowSocks seems to be the way to go if you want full control.
Nothing wrong with ExpressVPN for a simple solution but if/when it drops it blocks your Internet to protect you from sites finding your actual IP. That can be annoying if you are on a network seeking to often stop VPNs from working on it as you'll have to reconnect to a server which works (Which depending on the network you are on takes time).
SetUpVPN has a free for 500 megabytes or so per month if you want to give that a spin, throttles bandwidth on free and fully paid version though so YouTube and streaming are not likely for you.