Has Air given up on Eddie for desktop?

[airnoob 13]

Because it sure feels like they have, all we're hearing is it's "coming soon", but there's never any detail of what's coming or exactly when...

I ask because the staff may be seemingly unaware that Eddie is completely broken on Ubuntu 18.04 and seemingly no care is taken to ensure a software that hasn't been updated in almost a year works.

It's not okay to not update your major software for almost a year - at least issue patches and updates whilst working on the newer version.

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

The most recent version is a hotfix mentioned here: So it gets love if it doesn't work at all.

[Monotremata 22]

That still doesn't fix the Mac version.. 

[mwm 19]

On 7/30/2019 at 3:41 AM, Monotremata said:

That still doesn't fix the Mac version.. 

I asked support directly about the state of eddie on Mac OS and they just pointed me to the experimental releases which is knocking on a year old nearly. The experimental release doesn't fix any issues on Mac OS. I agree with @airnoob that not updating your software for over a year is bad practice even if it 'works' and for a VPN company this is unacceptable. IMO I think they have got side tracked with Eddie for Android and put Eddie for PC on the backburner. Either way I for one am getting impatient with the lack of updates on this 'new eddie' they've been talking about for months now! An update would be very welcome.

[Monotremata 22]

The 'experimental' build of Eddie is actually when all the problems started hah. Everything was fine up until then. It came out right around the time Mojave did so I was apt to blame something Apple did, but when I saw Linux and even Windows users with the same issues I was having (and some of their own too) I knew it wasnt MacOS's fault anymore. One of the whole reasons to come to Air over any other VPN provider is Eddie. If we have to use Tunnelblick or Viscosity or something else, than its no better than any other VPN that allows port forwarding or p2p traffic. It would be great if there was a way we could use PF ourselves to provide the same type of network lock, since thats Eddie's best feature, but no one can even figure out how to do it, and no one from Air will jump in and just tell us either. Eddie is what won me over 2 years ago when I joined, Im sure alot of people as well, how is Eddie doing now?

[mwm 19]

27 minutes ago, Monotremata said:

The 'experimental' build of Eddie is actually when all the problems started hah. Everything was fine up until then. It came out right around the time Mojave did so I was apt to blame something Apple did, but when I saw Linux and even Windows users with the same issues I was having (and some of their own too) I knew it wasnt MacOS's fault anymore. One of the whole reasons to come to Air over any other VPN provider is Eddie. If we have to use Tunnelblick or Viscosity or something else, than its no better than any other VPN that allows port forwarding or p2p traffic. It would be great if there was a way we could use PF ourselves to provide the same type of network lock, since thats Eddie's best feature, but no one can even figure out how to do it, and no one from Air will jump in and just tell us either. Eddie is what won me over 2 years ago when I joined, Im sure alot of people as well, how is Eddie doing now?

I agree, Eddie is what brought me here over other VPN providers. I have to use another VPN provider entirely on my Macbook because Eddie simply does not work. I always liked how open and communal Air felt but I know a lot of us feel our issues are currently being ignored.

[airnoob 13]

How strange, I see the staff are replying to other threads, but the one that's critical of them...Silence...

I mean, it's clear for all to see: They've entirely given up on Eddie for desktop, they KNOW it's broken and they have willingly ignored issuing patches instead favoring broken software (If you can install Eddie on Ubuntu 18.04 desktop then great, because when it loads for me it just crashes).

So great job Air, thanks for supporting the people who fund your business. It's great to see you'd rather get involved with political nonsense rather than making your own damn software functional.

ProMIND does an amazing job (although the Android version needs some improvements), so what is Clodo doing to actually get the new version out there?

Because we're a month from 12 months of NO UPDATES.

1 year. NO UPDATES.

Jesus.

[Staff 9973]

@airnoob

Eddie desktop edition development is up to Clodo and we have reported the roadmap in other threads. We leave further details to Clodo himself if he wishes to add anything. There's no doubt that several issues need to be fixed and they will be fixed. Nothing has been abandoned. For issues pertaining to Ubuntu 18, please open a ticket and it will be handled by developers.

Political nonsense is your opinion. If you want to insinuate that our support to freedom of expression is out of the scope of our mission than we completely disagree. We remain convinced that our actions of any kind are fully compliant to our mission, and even mandatory under some respect, in consideration of the attacks against fundamental rights which are unprecedented in "Western" countries in the last decades.

None of our actions in support of freedom of expression impacted Eddie desktop edition development in any way.

About projects assigned to ProMIND, they are all confirmed, in particular:

• further development of Eddie Android edition
• further development of new features on "OpenVPN 3.x AirVPN", on top of the already available ChaCha20 cipher on the Data Channale, new class supporting any AEAD cipher and ncp-disable directive
• development of new software for platforms based on Linux. FreeBSD and OpenBDS (OpenIndiana is under consideration), in this order
• MacOS will be part of the development for FreeBSD (various BSD elements on Darwin make the development for Mac partially compatible with ProMIND assignments with no over-complications, according to an initial overview)
• the new software for the aforementioned systems will initially couple Eddie, will use "OpenVPN 3 AirVPN" library (while Eddie will remain on OpenVPN 2 branch) and will not be tied to Mono in any way

It's important to underline again the the above projects have been, are and will be managed without subtracting any resource from Eddie desktop editions development. They are completely separate "branches" with their own, parallel and independent resources.

Kind regards
 

[airnoob 13]

"Nothing has been abandoned"

Except for updating your software that's critical to the operation of your service, not updating for almost 12 months is unheard of, and frequent releases used to be one of your strong points. 

"please open a ticket and it will be handled by developers."

There's already a link to a hotfix that was posted by the Staff account, why a new release hasn't been issued with this fix embedded is confusing. You know your software is buggy but seemingly no update is issued to resolve that.


I normally dislike speculating, but it feels like Clodo has you by the balls - I doubt you'd ever be truly open and transparent about what's happened to cause such a delay in software being released, because there HAS to be a reason, you normally did 1 release every few months in the past, then for almost a year there has been nothing for desktop.

And sure, since Windows "works" I guess it's not "that" critical? Software is rarely able to last a whole year without some patch fixes every now and then, and all I can say is your service is broken with your software on Ubuntu 18.04 and seemingly no care is taken to fix and release this fix as a new version.

It's a shame really, but when buying AirVPN users need to know the software is no longer supported or updated and it's a "best effort" basis.

[Staff 9973]

@airnoob

Quote

"Nothing has been abandoned"

Except for updating your software that's critical to the operation of your service, not updating for almost 12 months is unheard of, and frequent releases used to be one of your strong points. 

Hello!

This will be fixed for sure. We will not repeat the same mistake, trust us.
 

Quote

There's already a link to a hotfix that was posted by the Staff account, why a new release hasn't been issued with this fix embedded is confusing. You know your software is buggy but seemingly no update is issued to resolve that.

Stop, you misunderstood the whole matter: the patch fixed the corruption of the configuration file which was caused by the bootstrap servers output. It was not something to be fixed in the code of Eddie desktop editions, apart of course designing a software which handles in a better way corrupt configuration files.

The bootstrap servers were reconfigured with a new manifest format which introduced a bug: when someone tried to log the account in without having a valid plan, the bootstrap servers returned a bad message format that caused the corruption of the default.xml file of the user who did not have a valid plan.

The bug was fixed quickly in the bootstrap servers. The patch you mention fixes corrupt configuration files on the client side, as an alternative to delete them. Not essential, just an additional tool for those Windows users who tried to access the service without a valid plan.
 

Quote

I normally dislike speculating, but it feels like Clodo has you by the balls - I doubt you'd ever be truly open and transparent about what's happened to cause such a delay in software being released, because there HAS to be a reason, you normally did 1 release every few months in the past, then for almost a year there has been nothing for desktop.

Yes, you had better stop speculating. Clodo is an Air co-founder so your assumption is wrong.

We will let Clodo explain the exact reasons of such delays in development, if he wishes so. Here we just point out that any excessive work load on some department is being quickly balanced to avoid any further problem of this kind. AirVPN has both the resources and the will to continue delivering the best VPN experience in the consumers' market as it has always done in the last 8 years.

About the last year you mention, you can note that AirVPN has delivered from scratch not only an Android application with unrivaled features, but it is the only VPN which actively develops OpenVPN 3. AirVPN has added to OpenVPN 3 missing features that were never seen in it after years and years of development, like ChaCha20 cipher on the Data Channel. No other VPN service has ever achieved the same results.

Kind regards
 

[monstrocity 31]

@airnoob I agree with you that an Eddie desktop client update is long overdue.  That said, I have used the beta version form last September on Linux Mint 19.x, Xubuntu 18.04, and Peppermint 9/10 with no major issues.  When you say Eddie is "completely broken on Ubuntu", try to grab some logs and post them in the Troubleshooting and Problems section.  Some general issues to consider that might give Eddie problems include kernel updates (especially above 4.15.x, i.e., experimental) and mono being out of date.  Generally, I've found the community helpful when trying to troubleshoot and fix problems.  A new Eddie will come eventually.  For now, it still works for me and many others.  Attacking the development team isn't going to resolve anything.

[Staff 9973]

We also confirm that Eddie runs just fine in Ubuntu 18.04 with an exception: if you use systemd-resolved with on-link DNS, Eddie will be unable to force usage of VPN DNS. Since Eddie acts on /etc/resolv.conf and systemd-resolved takes total management of resolv.conf (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/OpenVPN#DNS ) Eddie operations on DNS will be ignored. At the moment you can revert to normal UNIX handling of global DNS.

In general the aforementioned, very dangerous abomination is only harmful when you use a VPN, because it has the power to give birth in Linux for the first time in history  to "DNS leaks", which were notorious only in system without a global DNS like Windows.

Kind regards

[nzxtd 0]

The latest version of OpenVPN is 2.4.7 released on 2019-2-21.
It includes several bugfixes and security improvements.

The current version is completely outdated and it's a shame no new versions come out despite the many requests.

For me it's goodbye AirVPN

[go558a83nk 362]

26 minutes ago, nzxtd said:

The latest version of OpenVPN is 2.4.7 released on 2019-2-21.
It includes several bugfixes and security improvements.

The current version is completely outdated and it's a shame no new versions come out despite the many requests.

For me it's goodbye AirVPN

You may be overreacting a bit.  For example, pfsense stable is still on openvpn 2.4.6 and another VPN provider I use is still using 2.4.6 with their app.  I don't know why that is but it seems to me that devs aren't in a hurry to move to the 2.4.7 version.

[Staff 9973]

1 hour ago, nzxtd said:

The latest version of OpenVPN is 2.4.7 released on 2019-2-21.
It includes several bugfixes and security improvements.

The current version is completely outdated and it's a shame no new versions come out despite the many requests.

For me it's goodbye AirVPN

Sorry but what does it have to do with Eddie? Eddie will run the OpenVPN binary you tell it to run.

Kind regards
 

[airnoob 13]

55 minutes ago, Staff said:

Sorry but what does it have to do with Eddie? Eddie will run the OpenVPN binary you tell it to run.

Kind regards
 

Yes, but I feel you're misrepresenting your userbase here, including myself.

Most people I suspect go to download the software, follow the instructions and hope for the best - Eddie has a lot of options that I'm suspecting users don't bother looking in to, they expect a "plug and play" experience, it's one of the benefits of things like USB. I don't care much for debugging driver issues or dealing with .inf files, I expect my USB to work when plugged in and no more. If not, then I might return the product as "faulty".

I downloaded Eddie onto 18.04 and it threw an error, I didn't care much for why just that it didn't work when I expected it to and resulted in constant crashes (even older versions, maybe an incompatibility with the kernel or something).

There's still a responsibility from Air to ensure the software they provide is updated on a frequent basis and is safe and secure to use. Even on the download page when you click "other versions" it says:

2.15.2 - 20/06/2018 - Latest stable
Which is obviously not true, but shows that little effort is being made around the core product AirVPN provides.

However. that said, Eddie is (sadly) still the king of clients, no other provider comes close (there are few open source clients and fewer with Eddie's level of customisation). 

I'd still prefer to understand what's gone wrong here, transparency is one of AirVPN's perks...Except when it comes to holding themselves accountable to their users, which is why I made the thread. Clodo should post a thread himself, as he's a founder and should be answerable to the user base. The fact that AirVPN doesn't have this culture internally is sort of worrying. 

Eddie is a flagship product and why many choose to subscribe, maybe they need more developers? Where exactly does the subscription money go? I'd rather see Eddie actively updated monthly or at least quarterly than money going to political theaters. I support Air for its software, not for its companies or founders beliefs.

It'd be wise for the staff to understand this, I choose to write on the forums but there are many that don't, how many potential or long term subscribers have they lost due to Eddie's lack of development? Air is apparently okay with this from a business perspective (or, maybe they're not, but seemingly no resolution has been found, maybe there are not so many C# developers around who can develop an OpenVPN client).

[Clodo 176]

Hi, I'm sorry about the delay on Eddie development, but in the next release we changed all source code from the ground up, to separate what needs elevated privileges and what not.
So we are re-testing all Eddie features.

For example, in the next release UI runs as normal user, and this can fix or cause worse issues in different Linux distributions. Re-testing all major distributions requires a lot of time.

Anyway, I hope to release it (as a beta version for feedback) when all supported OS (Win/macOS/Linux) are ready for use.

This is related to the next release of 2.X branch (the same UI you know).
In the meantime, we are building also the new universal UI for 3.X branch.

I hope we can release the new 2.x version as soon as possible.
I hope I can give you a date in a few days.
Sorry again for the delay.

[Staff 9973]

1 hour ago, Staff said:

Sorry but what does it have to do with Eddie? Eddie will run the OpenVPN binary you tell it to run.

Kind regards
 

 

Quote

Yes, but I feel you're misrepresenting your userbase here, including myself.

Most people I suspect go to download the software, follow the instructions and hope for the best - Eddie has a lot of options that I'm suspecting users don't bother looking in to, they expect a "plug and play" experience,

That's the way it is, plug and play.

It's important to know that Eddie for your Ubuntu Linux (as well as any other Debian derivative distribution) does not come pre-packaged with a specific OpenVPN version, unless you prefer a totally portable version.

The .deb package ensures correct handling of dependencies so when you install Eddie, latest available OpenVPN for your distribution will be downloaded and installed by apt, through gdebi or whatever your DM environment uses for that, in a totally transparent way for you. That's a reason for which it's totally plug and play and the objection to OpenVPN pertains to OpenVPN version available in a distribution repositories, not to Eddie.

About Ubuntu 18.04, we confirm, together with various users, that Eddie 2.16.3 and 2.17.2 beta run just fine, so we suspect that the problem is specific to your system, or maybe you have a corrupt default.xml, as we explained, that's why we invited you to open a ticket.

Kind regards
 

[airnoob 13]

Thank you to Clodo and the staff for replying.

There's no harm in communicating with the community: "hey, here's the status of Eddie". Maybe Clodo is the sole developer of the desktop version, maybe there's more than we're aware of but taking the time to talk doesn't take that long.

Also, this might not be possible, but I'd love to see development builds released with the source code (if that can be built into the workflow) so the community can help you and get involved (maybe that might help or hinder, but having many people poking around, finding/fixing bugs isn't a bad thing). Of course, scaling to deal with that can be a process in itself (handling PR's, issues etc).

But at least talking about the new version, the new UI, screenshots, progress reports, that can satisfy users (like me and some above) and keep them engaged. If you fall off a cliff entirely and disappear...Well threads like this happen asking "what is going on?".

Air provides a superior service and client, I want to give money for the development of these clients (for Clodo, ProMind and others) because they're what I use and rely on, on a daily basis, and are by far the best clients for OpenVPN in existance.

So please keep us posted, you may not realise it but some invest for exactly this reason, you're both a service provider and a software developer, I'd love to support that directly if you need more people (but I am sure finding good quality developers is not so easy. Many many people rely on code written by Clodo/ProMind so it's not an easy job).
 

[pj 72]

Quote

I'd rather see Eddie actively updated monthly or at least quarterly than money going to political theaters. I support Air for its software, not for its companies or founders beliefs.

Can you please tell me what you mean with political theaters?

Can you please  mention any other VPN service in the world which is actively developing OpenVPN 3 with never seen before, important features? Or any software house which was capable to deliver an effective leaks prevention like AirVPN did in Android and other systems for the first time ever?

Remember the all of the above is a consequence of our mission. You can't like a portion of our mission, it's monolithic: cut one piece, and all the rest will fall apart. If you prefer that our service is similar to those of dozens of other ones that are only interested in making gullible people happy, you had better use those services directly instead of trying to change the very essence of AirVPN.

https://airvpn.org/mission
 

[Clodo 176]

1 minute ago, airnoob said:

Maybe Clodo is the sole developer of the desktop version, 

I'm not, but the ground-up changes on Eddie base engine blocks other developers. This delay it's only my fault, the situation will be recovered as soon as possible.

[airnoob 13]

3 hours ago, pj said:

Can you please tell me what you mean with political theaters?

Can you please  mention any other VPN service in the world which is actively developing OpenVPN 3 with never seen before, important features? Or any software house which was capable to deliver an effective leaks prevention like AirVPN did in Android and other systems for the first time ever?

Remember the all of the above is a consequence of our mission. You can't like a portion of our mission, it's monolithic: cut one piece, and all the rest will fall apart. If you prefer that our service is similar to those of dozens of other ones that are only interested in making gullible people happy, you had better use those services directly instead of trying to change the very essence of AirVPN.

https://airvpn.org/mission
 

I mean, depending who you ask will depend what answers they will give. Personally, I support AirVPN for the service it provides in both its hardware and software. For sure the clients both Android and Windows et al are the most advanced, which is why I place such urgence in their support. It's vital to me these clients are kept up to date and have frequent releases, ProMIND has done an excellent job with Android (although, there are features I'd love to see as other comments have posted before).

My point was, to me, I care more for AirVPN and the service it provides and as such, I place an emphasis on understanding where Air is in its vital operations (I'd also have concerns if the servers quality was diminishing, but that's never been the case).

Anything else Air does I personally do not care about, I just want good servers and good software, and frequent releases are an essential part of my engagement with AirVPN, reassurance from Clodo is very welcome and I look forward to seeing future Eddie improvements. 

To be clear, I use Eddie software 24/7, exclusively Eddie desktop and Eddie Android, they must be kept updated, secure and bug free, the Android app needs a few tweaks to make it perfect but again, since they are of such importance I make a fuss about them (if they break, or are a hassle to use, I cannot use the internet, because I refuse to use anything but Eddie to use the internet).

[ArsProToto 0]

On 8/5/2019 at 9:52 PM, Staff said:

AirVPN has added to OpenVPN 3 missing features that were never seen in it after years and years of development, like ChaCha20 cipher on the Data Channel. No other VPN service has ever achieved the same results.

AirVPN currently has not added ChaCha20 Support to upstream OpenVPN3 because the pull request was closed in July and some code fixes were demanded.
But OpenVPN 3 might have some issues on some platforms so we will see how OpenVPN 3 release will go with Wireguard or other crypto protocols/apps.

[Staff 9973]

5 hours ago, ArsProToto said:

AirVPN currently has not added ChaCha20 Support to upstream OpenVPN3 because the pull request was closed in July and some code fixes were demanded.
But OpenVPN 3 might have some issues on some platforms so we will see how OpenVPN 3 release will go with Wireguard or other crypto protocols/apps.

Yes, OpenVPN3.3-airvpn is 22 commits ahead of the main branch. Note the objections by Schwabe to the code and the commits, then examine the source code and you will have all you need to know. You can use ChaCha20 right now in the Data Channel on OpenVPN 3 in Android with Eddie Android edition (which is released under GPLv3) or you can just compile the source code of the library, as usual we put our developments available to everybody.

Coming next: OpenVPN3.3-airvpn library integrated in a client for Linux systems based on ARM 64, x86 and x64.

Kind regards
 

[airnoob 13]

12 hours ago, Staff said:

Yes, OpenVPN3.3-airvpn is 22 commits ahead of the main branch. Note the objections by Schwabe to the code and the commits, then examine the source code and you will have all you need to know. You can use ChaCha20 right now in the Data Channel on OpenVPN 3 in Android with Eddie Android edition (which is released under GPLv3) or you can just compile the source code of the library, as usual we put our developments available to everybody.

Coming next: OpenVPN3.3-airvpn library integrated in a client for Linux systems based on ARM 64, x86 and x64.

Kind regards
 

schwabe explained what was required to get the code merged upstream, you decided to close the PR as can be seen here. This would be the same if you were submitting a patch to the kernel, subsystem maintainers have requirements and they themselves have requirements to get it merged in the next release branch by Linus or Greg for stable.

So as it turns out, he told you what needs be done and you refused. Whether his requirements are suitable is not for discussion since it's not your project. You may have requirements for PR's on Eddie branches as most OSS does. You need to comply or you can just maintain your own fork which is worse for the community as a whole.

To be clear, you may see this as "see, this guy is stopping us!" but instead it's "hey, we didn't comply with the requirements of this software to get our PR merged".