Snapping Privacy into Place: Proton’s GPL‑Powered Journey with Ubuntu

Ubuntu Summit Past Summits Ubuntu Summit 25.10
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Snapping Privacy into Place
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Title

Snapping Privacy into Place: Proton’s GPL‑Powered Journey with Ubuntu

Speaker(s)

Samuele Kaplun
Pedro Avalos Jimenez

Date and time

2025-10-24T10:50:00Z

Session type

:speech_balloon: Talk (25 minutes)

Abstract

Proton began in 2014 with the simple promise of putting privacy first. What started as Proton Mail - an end‑to‑end‑encrypted email service born out of CERN cafeteria - has since grown into an ecosystem that now includes Proton VPN, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, and more products, all united by the mission to make privacy the default for everyone.

This session traces Proton’s journey from a passion project to one of the largest privacy‑focused platforms, with a special focus on our deepening ties to open‑source communities and Ubuntu. We will explore:

Open‑source at Proton:
Releasing all our desktop and mobile clients codebases under GPLv3 on GitHub
Publishing Proton VPN on F‑Droid for unfettered access on fully libre Android devices
Long‑term stewardship of OpenPGP.js, the web’s most widely used JavaScript crypto library
How community feedback drives feature road‑maps and security audits

Proton on Linux: shipping first‑class .deb and .rpm packages and bringing Proton Mail Bridge, Proton Pass, and other desktop utilities to power users across distros.
Partnering with Canonical: why we chose the Snap Store for one‑click distribution, automatic updates, and secure confinement - and what that means for both enterprise and community users.

Finally, I’ll hand the mic to Pedro (Canonical) for a candid look at porting Proton Mail, Proton Pass, and the Bridge to Snap, the lessons learned from packaging Proton VPN, and the road ahead.

Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of how storefronts like Snap accelerate open‑source adoption for companies, reduce fragmentation for developers, and, ultimately, bring privacy‑respecting software to millions more people.

Speaker(s) bio

Samuele Kaplun is Proton VPN Engineering Director at Proton AG, the Company behind Proton Mail, Proton VPN and a growing Privacy-first Ecosystem of Products.

:question: Questions about this session? Please reply to this topic, top questions may be featured during the live event!

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  • Please share about your challenges with nation states that were okay in the past but turn to moral policing over time. and maybe Ban certain entertainment categories which pushes all this traffic over ProtonVPN.

  • What if they come for you asking for logs and asking to place your servers in their controlled geography ?

  • possible issue in version number on the site for linux. website shows 1.0.8 on your site, but installed one i have is 4. x

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There seems to be a rise in browsers directly integrating VPNs into their software (Vivaldi as a great example). Does this integration make it easier to broaden the availability of these security focused tools? Does it present any difficulties or added challenges?

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Hi! Sorry during the talk I haven’t fully understood your question. Let me answer point by point:

Please share about your challenges with nation states that were okay in the past but turn to moral policing over time. and maybe Ban certain entertainment categories which pushes all this traffic over ProtonVPN.

Absolutely, this is happening more and more often across the whole world. So what we have built and keep on building is precisely geared towards still allowing people to stay in control.

What if they come for you asking for logs and asking to place your servers in their controlled geography ?

We don’t have logs to hand out by construction of our architecture. (see: https://protonvpn.com/blog/no-logs-audit) in case governments are forcing our data-centers providers to still enforce handing out user information of what happens on our servers then we’d be moving out, as it has happened in India: https://protonvpn.com/blog/servers-india . This doesn’t mean we are not able to still provide a service to Indian users, as you can read in the blog.

possible issue in version number on the site for linux. website shows 1.0.8 on your site, but installed one i have is 4. x

That is the version of the single debian/ubuntu .deb package that allows to install our repository. After you install once that package, you are basically adding a Proton VPN additional repository to your system, and it will remain updated. Having added Proton VPN repository you are then able to install the regular client (which is made of many packages, hence the need for us to ship a repository).

This very question, shows how Snap packaging could help simplify installing more complex software, as you have a single product to install and not a whole set of dependencies. But unfortunately, due to the technical complexity of Proton VPN, we’re not yet available on the Snap store as of now.

Hope this clarifies all your questions :slight_smile:

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